Don’t ask your driver any complicated questions: even if his eyes are on the road, his mind won’t be. Spanish researchers report today that mental arithmetic or other complex tasks can reduce a motorist’s ability to spot trouble ahead by as much as 30%.
Two psychologists from Spain’s traffic safety administration and the Universidad Complutense in Madrid studied 12 adult volunteers who each drove for four hours on the highway north of Madrid.
The car was a standard Citroen with an unusual extra: an unobtrusive eye-tracking system that monitored drivers’ gaze and focus as they answered questions from an experimenter, either in the car or by hands-free phone.
One challenge was to mentally change euros into pesetas. Another was to recall what they were doing at a certain time on a certain day.
As the drivers did so the camera mapped how often they checked things such as the speedometer or the rear-view mirror. And as they did so an automatic system randomly flashed spotlights in the driver’s field of vision. The volunteers had to respond to the sudden lights by pressing a button near the steering wheel. How they performed this task provided a second measure of their distraction during mental tasks.
The results, published today in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, confirm that thinking about anything except the road ahead is a dangerous strategy. The findings also underpin responses in post-accident police reports such as ”I saw it too late”.
Mentally distracted drivers still know how to drive — but don’t see things fast enough or well enough.
The experiment confirmed that some conversation on a hands free, voice-operated mobile phone is no more dangerous than desultory chat with a front-seat passenger. But as levels of complexity rose, so did the risk of distraction.
”Complex conversations, whether by phone or with a passenger, are dangerous for road safety,” report Miguel Goldarecena and Luis Gonzalez. ”It is easy to understand how one cannot see because of not looking, but it is less obvious to explain how one looks but does not see.” – Guardian Unlimited Â