Winnie,
As a driver of a Spitfire most days of the week, I shudder at the
thought of being hit by one of those SUVs! I'm glad you came out of
it with nothing more than bruises and scrapes. Your last comment, the
one about "cell phone while you drive," struck a chord with me. I am
an experimental psychologist who teaches a course in cognition. One
of the topics in the course is "attention." As a lab exercise, I gave
my class the task of designing an experiment which could demonstrate
whether cell phone use occupies enough attention that driving might
be impaired. I'll enclose the (long) summary of the study below, but
the upshot was that we have evidence that activities like cell phone
use do impair performance (as if we couldn't figure that out on our own!).
I apologize for the stilted language of the summary.
Regards,
Tim Gaines
Clinton, SC
1980 Spitfire
1974 TR6
>Thanks for the sentiments. Hopefully someone picks up whats left of the Spit
>and can give it a second life in another car. It's a strange feeling to not
>really bum out about losing the Spit. While I wish I still had it..
>especially so close to Spring... I am simply so thankful to have come out of
>it OK that I'm counting my blessings. It makes me "weak in the knees" to
>look at how caved in the driver door and windshield are. I have no idea how
>I came out with a few cuts and a badly bruised side. Just bruises! I dont
>get it! The "Triumph Gods" wanted me to finish the TR6. It's not my time
>yet. When I can figure out how to get a picture of it on line it would be
>very sobering to others to take a look. My lesson learned is.. drive with my
>lights on at all times!! Just like motorcyclists do to be more visible. In
>all my cars actually.
>Especially with all the "cell phone while you drive"
>drivers out there. Maybe I'll paint the 6 dayglow tie-dye. Austin Powers
>TR6?
>
>Take care
>Winnie
Summary
Our current understanding of the construct "attention" centers on
the notion that it consists of a limited pool of cognitive resources which
may be applied to the moment-by-moment demands of a task or tasks with
which we are occupied. Some skills may be overlearned to the point that
they become "automatic" and make few if any demands on our limited
attention capacity. Such activities can be superimposed onto other tasks
without causing a detectable decrement in performance. However, other
skills are more "effortful" and do exact a toll on performance. One
well-accepted technique for measuring the attentional demands of a primary
task requires the use of a simple secondary reaction time task. The logic
is that the more effortful the primary task (that is the more attention
required), the slower the reaction time will be to an unpredictable
stimulus such as a tone.
The dual task technique was employed in a laboratory activity
designed to be analogous to driving while simultaneously talking on a cell
phone. The primary (driving) task was the video game "Paperboy" which is
familiar to nearly all college students. It requires the steering of a
bicycling paperboy through a variety of obstacles and threats to his life.
The game is sufficiently simple to enough students that it might be
essentially automatic. The secondary reaction time task required that
participants respond to randomly timed tones by pressing a "brake" pedal
with the right foot as quickly as possible. Times were recorded to the
nearest millisecond. Each participant was run through this basic procedure
twice, once with a simultaneous "phone" task which required continuously
listening to sets of four words and quickly repeating them, and once
without the repetition task. Half of the participants were run in each of
the two possible orders of the conditions. Each condition lasted only four
minutes during which the tone sounded 12 times at irregular intervals.
Sixteen participants from Introductory Psychology classes were run
initially, but because of the unreliable performance of the foot pedal
switch, another 16 were run after the pedal was redesigned.
A median reaction time was computed for each subject in each of the
two conditions, with and without the word repetition task. The mean was
not used because several participants failed to respond at all to some
tones (seven times in the word repetition condition and once in the no-word
condition) and therefore arbitrary reaction times would have to be assigned
to compute a mean. The median (middle) reaction time was computed simply
by assuming that the absence of a response represented a reaction time in
the upper half of the 12 times. The mean of the 16 median reaction times
was computed for each condition, and it was observed that the time for
pedal responses in the word repetition condition (M = 1080.4) was 94.6
milliseconds slower than in the no-word condition (M = 985.9). The
difference was statistically significant (p < .02) which indicates that it
is unlikely that such a difference would occur as a result of random
variability.
There is good evidence that the word repetition task added to the
attentional demands of the participants and thereby slowed their reaction
times. We would like to argue that the video-game task, the word
repetition task, and the tone reaction time task are sufficiently analogous
to driving, talking on a phone, and applying brakes to permit the
conclusion that cell phone use adds a risk to driving that goes beyond the
problem of occupying one hand which might normally be on the steering
wheel. Furthermore, we believe that the laboratory activity employed
underestimates the negative impact of the word repetition task. A true
conversation requires more than just repeating something just heard.
Our advice to drivers is just what the Tappet brothers of PBS' "Car
Talk" program recommend,"Drive now, talk later."
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