Strayer Johnston 2001
Strayer Johnston 2001
Strayer Johnston 2001
Research Article
DRIVEN TO DISTRACTION:
Dual-Task Studies of Simulated Driving and Conversing on a
Cellular Telephone
David L. Strayer and William A. Johnston
University of Utah
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PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
EXPERIMENT 1
Our first study was designed to contrast the effects of handheld and
hands-free cell-phone conversations on a simulated-driving task (viz.,
pursuit tracking). We also included a control group who listened to the
radio while performing the simulated-driving task. As participants
performed the simulated-driving task, occasional red and green lights
flashed on the computer display. If participants saw a green light, they
were instructed to continue. However, if a red light was presented,
they were to make a braking response as quickly as possible. The redlight/green-light manipulation was included to determine how quickly
participants could react to the red light, as well as to determine the
probability of failing to detect these simulated traffic signals, under
the assumption that slowed reaction time to traffic signals and failure
to notice them would contribute significantly to any increase in the
risks associated with driving and using a cell phone.
Method
Participants
Forty-eight undergraduates (24 male, 24 female) from the University of Utah participated in the experiment. They ranged in age from
18 to 30, with an average age of 21.3. All had normal or corrected-tonormal vision and received a perfect score on the Ishihara color blindness test (Ishihara, 1993). Participants were randomly assigned to the
three groups: radio control, handheld phone, and hands-free phone.
Procedure
The study consisted of three phases. The first phase was a warm-up
interval that lasted 7 min and was used to acquaint participants with
the tracking task. The second phase was the single-task portion of the
study and comprised the 7.5-min segments immediately preceding and
immediately following the dual-task portion of the study. During the
single-task phase, participants performed the tracking task by itself.
The third phase was the dual-task portion of the study, lasting 15 min.
The dual-task condition required the participants to engage in a conversation with a confederate (or listen to a radio broadcast of their
choosing) while concurrently performing the tracking task.
Participants in the phone-conversation groups were asked to discuss either the then-ongoing Clinton presidential impeachment or the
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(ANOVA) indicated that the probability of missing red lights increased from single- to dual-task conditions for the combined cellphone group, F(1, 30) 8.8, p .01. By contrast, the difference between single- and dual-task conditions was not reliable for the radio
control group, F(1, 15) 0.64, p .44.
The reaction time to the simulated traffic signals is presented in
Figure 1b. As with the miss data, the data for the two cell-phone
groups (handheld and hands-free) were collapsed because preliminary
analyses indicated that there were no reliable differences between
these groups, F(1, 30) 0.01, p .90. A one-way ANOVA revealed
that participants in the combined cell-phone group responded more
slowly in the dual-task condition than in the single-task condition,
F(1, 30) 28.9, p .01. A subsidiary analysis of this combined
group found that the disruptive effects of the phone conversation were
greater when participants were talking than when they were listening to the confederate, although both dual-task deficits were reliable,
F(2, 60) 19.8, p .01.2 There again was no indication of a dualtask decrement for the radio control group. Indeed, there was a tendency for reaction time to decrease in the dual-task condition for this
group, F(1, 15) 3.2, p .09.
These data are important because they demonstrate that the phone
conversation itself resulted in significant slowing in response to simulated traffic signals, as well as an increase in the probability of missing
these signals. Moreover, the fact that handheld and hands-free cell
phones resulted in equivalent dual-task deficits indicates that the interference was not due to peripheral factors such as holding the phone
while conversing. These data are also consistent with the studies reporting no reliable performance differences between participants using handheld and hands-free cell phones (Redelmeier & Tibshirani,
1997).
Method
Twenty undergraduates (10 male and 10 female) from the University of Utah participated. They ranged in age from 18 to 30, with a
mean age of 20.8. All had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and
received a perfect score on the Ishihara color blindness test (Ishihara,
1993).
2. Miss rates were also greater when participants were speaking than when
they were listening; however, this trend was not reliable.
464
The procedure was identical to that used for the radio control condition, with the exception that participants listened to selected portions
from a book on tape (Brokaw, 1998) during the dual-task phase of the
experiment. At the end of the study, participants completed a 10-item
multiple-choice questionnaire to assess the degree to which they had
attended to the verbal material from the book on tape. Four participants who failed to score at least 90% on the posttest were omitted
from subsequent analyses, resulting in a sample of 16 participants who
clearly attended to the book on tape.
EXPERIMENT 2
In our second study, we attempted to more specifically localize the
source of cell-phone interference on driving. Participants performed
the simulated-driving task on both an easy, predictable course and a
difficult, unpredictable course. After a warm-up phase acquainting
participants with the simulator, they performed each course in singletask mode as well as in two dual-task conditions involving the use of a
cell phone. One of the dual-task conditions was a shadowing task in
which the participants performed the simulated-driving task while
they repeated words that the experimenter read to them over a handheld cell phone. Thus, the shadowing dual-task condition assessed the
contribution of holding the phone, listening, and speaking to the dualtask performance deficits. The other dual-task condition was a wordgeneration task that was identical to the shadowing task with the exception that the participant was required to generate a new word that
began with the last letter of the word read by the experimenter. For example, if the experimenter read the word molar, the participant was
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PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Method
Participants
Twenty-four undergraduates (12 male and 12 female) from the
University of Utah participated in the experiment. They ranged in age
from 18 to 26, with an average age of 20.5. All had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and received a perfect score on the Ishihara
color blindness test (Ishihara, 1993).
Procedure
Participants performed a pursuit tracking task similar to that used
in the first study. The easy and difficult conditions were blocked in
counterbalanced order, and the order of single- and dual-task conditions was counterbalanced within each level of course difficulty. In
both dual-task conditions, the experimenter read four- and five-letter
words to the participant at a rate of one word every 3 s. The word lists
used in the experiment were counterbalanced across participants and
conditions.
Fig. 2. Root mean squared (RMS) tracking error for the easy and difficult courses in single- and dual-task conditions in Experiment 2.
GENERAL DISCUSSION
The principal findings are that (a) when participants were engaged
in cell-phone conversations, they missed twice as many simulated traffic signals as when they were not talking on the cell phone and took
longer to react to those signals that they did detect; (b) these deficits
were equivalent for handheld and hands-free cell-phone users; and (c)
tracking error increased when participants used the cell phone to perform an active, attention-demanding word-generation task but not
when they performed a shadowing task.
These data are consistent with an attention-based interpretation in
which the disruptive effects of cell-phone conversations on driving are
due primarily to the diversion of attention from driving to the phone
conversation itself. The largest dual-task performance deficits were
obtained in the generative portions of the cell-phone conversations;
however, even the listening components were associated with dualtask decrements. Thus, the simulator studies described in this report
and the field studies of Redelmeier and Tibshirani (1997) provide converging evidence on the locus of interference. We note that these results are problematic for multiple-resource models of divided attention
(e.g., Wickens, 1992). Such models suggest that an auditory-verbalvocal cell-phone conversation should not interfere substantially with a
visual-spatial-manual driving task (see also Briem & Hedman, 1995;
Moray, 1999). Indeed, attending to auditory inputs in the radio and
book-on-tape control conditions of Experiment 1 and in the shadowing task of Experiment 2 did not lead to dual-task interference; however, conversing using either a handheld or a hands-free cell phone in
Experiment 1 and word generation in Experiment 2 resulted in significant interference. Wickens (1999) has suggested that multiple-resource
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models might be able to account for the interference between cellphone conversations and driving because there may be an overlap in
the stages of processing between the two tasks. But given the similarity of the stages of processing in the shadowing and generation conditions of Experiment 2, this interpretation would seem to erroneously
predict similar patterns of dual-task interference for these two conditions.3
We suggest that cellular-phone use disrupts performance by diverting attention to an engaging cognitive context other than the one immediately associated with driving. Some aspects of driving are
inherently unpredictable (e.g., reacting to a child who darts across the
street), and when attention is diverted from the driving context, the appropriate reactions to these unpredictable events will be impaired.
Thus, the dual-task decrements described in this article appear to be
consistent with the literatures on task and attention switching (e.g.,
Allport, Styles, & Hsieh, 1994; Gopher, Greenshpan, & Armony,
1996; Rogers & Monsell, 1995).
It is also interesting to consider the potential differences between
cell-phone conversations and in-person conversations with other occupants of the vehicle. Although there need not be differences between
these two modes of communication, there is evidence that in-person
conversations are modulated by driving difficulty, so that as the demands of driving increase, participation by all participants in a conversation decreases (Parks, 1991). By contrast, at least one of the
participants in a cellular-phone conversation is unaware of the current
driving conditions (and may even be unaware that the cell-phone user
is driving). Under such circumstances, it is less likely that the conversation will be modulated as a function of the real-time variations in driving difficulty. Moreover, although other in-car dual-task activities (e.g.,
dialing the phone, eating a sandwich) are under the direct control of the
driver, when the driver engages in a cell-phone conversation, he or she
is no longer solely in control of the dynamics of the conversation (i.e., a
cell-phone conversation is jointly controlled by the participants).
In sum, we found that conversing on either a handheld or a handsfree cell phone led to significant decrements in simulated-driving performance. Thus, the available evidence indicates that there are at least
two sources of interference with driving associated with concurrent
cell-phone use: one due to peripheral factors such as manipulating the
466
phone while dialing (e.g., Briem & Hedman, 1995; Brookhuis et al.,
1991) and one due to the phone conversation itself. Our data imply
that legislative initiatives that restrict handheld devices but permit
hands-free devices are not likely to reduce interference from the phone
conversation, because the interference is, in this case, due to central attentional processes.
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