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>>DAVIDSTRAYER: My name is David Strayer, and I'm a psychologist. I study cognitive
neuroscience. That's the study of thinking, memory, perception, decision making, and trying
to understand how the brain is responsible for those behaviors. Science in action.
When I started working, I worked in telecommunications just when cellphones were starting to become
popular. And at that time it was pretty clear that you could become sufficiently distracted
by the use of cellphone technology when you're trying to drive a car.
So, I've been studying driver distraction. Looking at what we understand about attention
and how the brain can multitask, and how that relates to our everyday behaviors, driving
an automobile.
[talking to participant] "You can go ahead and start the car now."
Why I love this job is I can basically ask any question I want about what makes us tick
and how we behave, and use research methods, and the scientific method to be able to answer
those questions. That means observing, making hypothesizes, designing experiments and testing
them.
A lot of times people think, if your eyes are on the road, and your hands are on the
wheel, you'll be fine. But if you use a cell phone is that something that actually harms
driving behavior? And how does it differ from other things like listening to a radio? Or
talking to a passenger? We're interested in things like handheld and hands-free cell phones.
How do those differ?
We found that if you talk on a cell phone you are four times more likely to be involved
in a crash, that's the same crash risk as if you were driving at a .08 blood alcohol
level -- if you're drunk. Worse is if you're texting, you're eight more times likely to
be involved in a crash. That's substantially worse than the drunk driver. We're looking
now at some of the voice-based technologies.
>>DRIVER: Hello SIRI? Read appointments.
>>DAVID STRAYER: What we I think have learned is that some of the these voice-based technologies
are putting demands on the brain to try and multitask in ways that exceed the capacity
to be able to do that activity and drive safely.
We know that the research that's come out of my laboratory has been influential in changing
regulatory policies and laws.
At this point 41 states in the United States now have laws that make it against the law
to text while driving. There's a number of multinational, multi-billion dollar companies
that have taken the research that we've collected and have used that as a basis for policies
for not using their cell phones while driving. They substantially reduced the total number
of crashes for their employees, and there was no loss in productivity.
At the end of the day, we would hope that you're going to see fewer fatalities on the
roadway because people are not distracted.
That's taking psychology and translating it directly into action -- that's science in
action.