Texting while driving may pose a unique risk compared to other forms of distracted driving, according to an experiment recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Unlike driving while absent-minded or driving while emotional, driving while texting actually caused study participants to drive unsafely by deviating from the lines. Comparatively — and counterintuitively — the cognitive and emotional distractions actually made participants drive even more safely and in an even straighter line.
The researchers attributed this hyper-focus despite distracting thoughts to a “sixth sense” that corrects driving deviations.
“The driver’s mind can wander and his or her feelings may boil, but a sixth sense keeps a person safe at least in terms of veering off course,” said lead author Ioannis Pavlidis, a computer science professor at the University of Houston’s Computational Physiology Lab. “What makes texting so dangerous is that it wreaks havoc onto this sixth sense.”
The study’s findings underscore the dangers of texting while driving, which has in the past been compared to drunk and drugged driving because of how dangerous it can be. Pavlidis hopes that the research will help develop a car monitoring system that can sense when a person is distracted by a screen while driving.
What we knew before:
Texting while driving is a far more dangerous distraction compared to eating, talking, adjusting music or using in-vehicle navigation systems, because it takes a person’s eyes off the road for longer and more frequently. The U.S. government calls texting while driving “by far the most alarming distraction,” and some research argues that drivers who text are just as impaired as people who drive while drunk.
Distracted driving is also a serious public health problem. In 2013, 3,154 people died in crashes linked to distracted driving, and injuries linked to distracted driving are up. Some 424,000 people were injured in 2013, an almost 10 percent increase since 2011.
Because of statistics like these, 46 states and Washington, D.C. have laws that ban all drivers from text messaging. Among the four states without an overall ban, two ban texting for new drivers and one bans texting for school bus drivers.
The study details:
Pavlidis wanted to study the effects of three different types of distractions — cognitive, emotional and physical — on drivers.
He recruited 59 participants to use a high-fidelity driving simulator under two different conditions: normal and stressed. Under normal conditions, participants drove on a straight highway to establish baseline measures of steering and driving performance, as well as their bodily response to the driving exercise.
Then, to stress the drivers, Pavlidis distracted them in different ways. Some participants got cognitive distractions in the form of questions meant to induce a state of absent-mindedness, including simple math questions. Some were emotionally distracted with highly charged questions like, “Have you ever lied on a resume?”
Lastly, some were asked to operate the driving simulator while texting a message with one hand.
Read more of the original article in Huffington Post
