Tag Archives: Cognition

A Good Article on Mobile Devices and Driving

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A 2009 AAA Foundation study found that 91.5 percent of drivers considered talking on the phone while driving a serious threat to their safety; 97 percent said it was completely unacceptable to send a text or e-mail while driving. But two-thirds of those people admitted talking on their own phones while driving, and 1 in 7 have texted while driving.

That little tidbit exposing the hypocrisy of the American driver comes from an article in the Christian Science Monitor, “Texting while driving: the new drunk driving.”  I wouldn’t be surprised if a good percentage of the 1/3 who didn’t admit to talking on the phone while driving were people who don’t even have phones. When the phone rings and you are driving, its a difficult temptation to resist.

I’m going to leave aside the question of texting while driving because, although I must confess I have done it, it is so obviously a stupid thing to do and clearly dangerous.  Apparently simply talking on the phone  is quite dangerous, as well, moreso than I realized.

At the University of Utah’s Applied Cognition Laboratory, Professor Strayer has been testing this do-as-I-say theory for a decade. Using neuroimaging and a drive simulator, he and his colleagues have watched what happens when drivers – including those who claim to be able to text, tweet, and talk safely at the wheel – mix cellphones and cars.

The results are stark: Almost nobody multiprocesses the way they think they can. For 98 percent of the population, regardless of age, the likelihood of a crash while on a cellphone increases fourfold; the reaction to simulated traffic lights, pedestrians, and vehicles is comparable to that of someone legally intoxicated.

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Now here is the thing I find really interesting.  Strayer’s research found that there was little difference between the distraction level of those on hand held sets and hands free headsets.

The disruption, he says, is cognitive. Unlike a conversation with a passenger sharing the same physical space of the car, the electronic conversation takes a driver into a virtual space away from the road.

“We record brain activity,” Strayer says, “and we can show that it’s suppressed from the cellphone conversation.”

That’s odd and interesting, but believable.  Phone conversations are different from in person conversations and even if you could hear both sides of the conversation, you would probably know very quickly it was a mobile phone conversation.  And I feel like a lot of people can’t even walk straight while talking on their mobile phones.  They wander around drunkenly obliviously to everything and everyone around them. Its very odd.

Anyway, this is a good article, full of interesting tidbits.  Check it out.

Multitasking May Not Mean Higher Productivity

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Electronics and Multitasking I was listening to NPR on my way to the beach on Friday and I found myself wanting to stick my fingers in my ears and sing loudly, “La, la, la, la…,” so disturbing was what I was hearing.

It was a segment on Talk of the Nation, Science Friday August 28 that dealt with a study of multitasking.  Apparently people who think they are great at multitasking are not.  Apparently they are not only not good at multitasking, but their cognitive abilities are impaired in other areas as well.  At least that is what Clifford Nass from Stanford University found in the research he described on NPR’s Science Friday.

So the three abilities we looked at were – the first is filtering: the ability to ignore irrelevant information and focus on relevant information. And I had thought, more than my other two colleagues, that that was a particular gift that high multitaskers had. But in fact, multitaskers are suckers for distraction and suckers for the irrelevant, and so the more irrelevant information they see, the more they’re attracted to it.

The second ability is the ability to manage your working memory, keep it neatly organized, be able to – the way I usually think about it is, imagine having very neat filing cabinets where you carefully and quickly place things in the right cabinet, and when you need the information, you immediately know which filing cabinet to go to. They’re actually much worse at that.
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And finally, the biggest surprise to the two other authors of the study, Eyal Ophir and Anthony Wagner, the biggest surprise was that they’re even slower and worse at switching from one task to another. You would’ve thought that, at the very least, would be the key gift of multitaskers, but they’re actually worse.

As if that weren’t bad enough there seems to be some evidence that multitasking impairs other types of thought more generally.

I think the reason it’s so frightening is we actually didn’t study people while they were multitasking. We studied people who were chronic multitaskers, and even when we did not ask them to do anything close to the level of multitasking they were doing, their cognitive processes were impaired. So basically, they are worse at most of the kinds of thinking not only required for multitasking but what we generally think of as involving deep thought.

I don’t think of myself as particularly good at multitasking, but I do it a lot.  It seems like a necessity in today’s world.  So are we dumbing ourselves down?