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“Hail to old KU”
I’m Paul Atchley , Associate Professor
I’m also Assistant Chair for Undergraduate Studies in the Department
of Psychology.
One of the things that has been discovered, I would say over the last
thirty years is what we call “the grand illusion.”
And that is this idea that when we have our eyes open we sort of seeing everything.
But, what the eye can see and what the brain actually detects are two very
different things.
Because we have a limited amount of information that we can process,
and that's where attention comes in. The problem is we have to use what we call
our attentional resources to do everything that we do.
So, if you're engaging in one task like listening and talking, i.e. talking on a cell
phone , while trying to do another task like driving where you're actually
controlling a steering wheel and trying to look out in the environment and spot
potential problems,
you’re trying to divide your attention between multiple tasks and that leaves
less attention for each individual task.
We know that talking on a cell phone
hands-free is about a 500% increase in accident risk
and texting and driving is about a 2400%
increase in accident risk.
Drunk driving is only a 400% increase in accident risk. So, both of
those behaviors are worse
than driving drunk, and yet people continue to do it.
The problem is that at least for something like texting, as an example,
it's a behavior that's very, very common in a certain group. If you look at the
college students that we have today, texting is their primary means of communication.
And text messaging while driving is probably the most dangerous thing you can do in a
vehicle other than driving with your eyes closed.
In fact it is
kind of like driving with your eyes closed in that the average amount of time
someone spends looking away from the roadway while text messaging is about
four seconds per text message.
So, if you can imagine driving down the road and closing your eyes for four
seconds you can get some idea of what it's like to text message while driving.
We actually asked people if they initiate text messages while driving,
if they
reply to text messages while driving, or if they just read text messages while
driving. That 70% figure that we came up with
were people that initiate text messages while the vehicle is moving. If we looked
at people actually replying to text messages, now it goes up to 82%.
And, if we looked at people reading text messages it goes up to 94%.
Basically,
only about 2% of the drivers that we surveyed on the KU campus
don't engage in some form of text messaging while driving.
They're all doing it.
So, one criticism that's often been leveled is that cell phones are being
inappropriately targeted. That there's so many other threats in the vehicle like
people messing with their radios or putting on makeup or eating hamburgers.
Why is it that we’re picking on cell phones?
And the answer to that is, one, these other behaviors, while they are dangerous,
they're not necessarily as dangerous. About 60-80% of on-air
minutes are spent in vehicles.
And you multiply that times the number of people that actually have cell phones
and use them while driving.
You can see that something like talking on a phone or texting
is far different in terms of its magnitude then something like eating
or putting on makeup.
Though everyone's seen people texting and driving or talking on a cell
phone
not enough of us have had first-hand experience of someone getting injured or
killed
as result of that. That'll happen unfortunately,
and when it reaches a certain point we’ll decide that this is something that we
have to deal with.