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Did You See the Unicycling Clown? Inattentional Blindness while Walking and Talking on a Cell Phone
Abstract
We investigated the effects of divided attention during walking. Individuals were classified based on whether they were walking while talking on a cell phone, listening to an MP3 player, walking without any electronics, or walking in a pair. In the first study, we found that cell phone users walked more slowly, changed directions more frequently, and were less likely to acknowledge other people than individuals in the other conditions. In the second study, we found that cell phone users were less likely to notice an unusual activity along their walking route (a unicycling clown). Cell phone usage may cause inattentional blindness even during a simple activity that should require few cognitive resources.
... Further, many studies have stated that speed and type of oncoming vehicle has an impact on pedestrians' crossing intentions and subsequently on their safety Chaudhari et al., 2021;Kadali & Vedagiri, 2016). One of the other important factors is inattention among the road users while crossing (Hyman et al., 2010). Though the inattention effects of distraction among drivers have been studied extensively (Choudhary & Velaga, 2017a;Le et al., 2020;Michaud et al., 2018;NHTSA, 2021), they are scarcely studied among pedestrians. ...
... In comparison to non-distracted condition, pedestrians under distracted conditions take more time to initiate crossing (Byington & Schwebel, 2013;Neider et al., 2010;Stavrinos et al., 2009), walk slow (Hatfield & Murphy, 2007), change directions frequently (Hyman et al., 2010), miss more opportunities (Byington & Schwebel, 2013;Neider et al., 2010;Stavrinos et al., 2011), adopt risky road crossing behaviour (Byington & Schwebel, 2013;Nasar et al., 2008;O'Neal et al., 2012;Stavrinos et al., 2009Stavrinos et al., , 2011, and make more violations (Aghabayk et al., 2021;Larue et al., 2021). The effects of mobile phone distraction on pedestrians have been generally studied using observational (Banducci et al., 2016;Harrison, 2017;Hatfield & Murphy, 2007), self-reporting (Lennon et al., 2017;Moyano Díaz, 2002;Schwebel et al., 2008;White et al., 2017),virtual-simulator (Deb et al., 2017;Feldstein, 2019;Jiang et al., 2018;Murray, 2006;Tapiro et al., 2014) and naturalistic studies (Gruden et al., 2021b;Jha et al., 2017;Jiang et al., 2018;Neider et al., 2010;Takagi et al., 2006;. ...
... If they maintain the same speed under distraction condition, then the probability of involvement is increased by 44 %. The probable reason behind increased unsafe interaction during distraction is a decrement in pedestrians' situation awareness capabilities (i.e., assessing, understanding and decision-making) while being distracted (Hatfield & Murphy, 2007;Hyman et al., 2010;Nasar et al., 2008;Stavrinos et al., 2011). The increase in cognitive load leads to a decrease in efficacy of decision-making due to delayed perceiving and processing of relevant information (Jiang et al., 2018;Simmons et al., 2020). ...
Use of mobile phones while crossing the road has become a growing safety concern among pedestrians. Though recently, some studies have attempted to understand risky behaviour of distracted pedestrians by analyzing impacts of distraction on pedestrians' walking and visual characteristics, the impacts were measured individually. Moreover, most of the existing findings are based on lab-based experiments, whereas the real-world conditions are quite dynamic in nature. Hence, to overcome these gaps, the current study aims to understand to what extent different potential factors (such as distraction, walking characteristics, visual behaviour, etc.) affect the risk of unsafe pedestrian-vehicle interactions in real-world settings. For this purpose, a field experiment was designed to understand the impact of distraction on pedestrians' risky behaviour using an eye-tracker at an unsignalized intersection in Delhi. The risk assessment was done using Post-Encroachment Time (PET) measure. The results indicate that the use of mobile phone while crossing the road increased the chances of unsafe (PET < 1.5 s) pedestrian-vehicle interactions by approximately eight folds. Surprisingly, pedestrians who crossed the intersection at high speed had higher chances of unsafe interactions, whereas their increased crossing initiation time reduced the probability of unsafe interactions. Moreover, increased pupil diameter and fixating more on vehicles approaching from the right side resulted in a reduced probability of unsafe interactions. However, the high frequency of saccades and higher fixations on the cross-walk's right side negatively affected unsafe interactions. This study highlights that it is important to consider visual characteristics along with demographic and walking and traffic characteristics as they can provide in-depth insights into pedestrians' road crossing behaviour that are required to design and implement effective countermeasures and policies.
... Gary et al. (2018) estimated that smartphone use is responsible for between 5% and 30% of falls and walking accidents. Hyman et al. (2010) can be among the first to investigate the effect of smartphone use on visual and cognitive processes while walking. In their field study, pedestrians using their mobile/smartphones showed reduced situational awareness and developed inattentional blindness; they overlooked a highly noticeable event, such as a unicycling clown (Hyman et al., 2010) or valuable objects, such as dollar bills (Hyman et al., 2014) while using their phones. ...
... Hyman et al. (2010) can be among the first to investigate the effect of smartphone use on visual and cognitive processes while walking. In their field study, pedestrians using their mobile/smartphones showed reduced situational awareness and developed inattentional blindness; they overlooked a highly noticeable event, such as a unicycling clown (Hyman et al., 2010) or valuable objects, such as dollar bills (Hyman et al., 2014) while using their phones. These results have been successfully replicated using a larger sample size in different cultures (Chen & Pai, 2018;Pai, 2017). ...
... In addition, they found a correlation between walking speed and luminance contrast in detecting visual cues; participants walking faster required a higher luminance contrast to detect the cues on the ground. Hyman et al. (2010) found that smartphone use negatively affected walking performance. Pedestrians using a smartphone walked more slowly, weaved, and changed direction more often than people who did not use their phones. ...
People tend to deviate to the right when walking through a narrow aperture (e.g., a doorway), resulting in a rightward bias in collisions. This study examines the effects of smartphone use on rightward collisions while walking. When pedestrians walk through a narrow aperture, they usually head straight to the perceived centre of the aperture, which is shifted slightly to the right, without updating the estimates. The rightward shift of the perceived centre is attributable to the rightward attentional shift in the extrapersonal space. Pedestrians using smartphones tend to fixate on the phone most of the time and thus tend not to look at their surroundings (i.e., extrapersonal space). Therefore, we predict that smartphone use will reduce rightward collisions. To test this prediction, we used a narrow-doorway task in which participants walked through a narrow doorway either with or without a smartphone. The participants with smartphones used them to perform either verbal or spatial tasks. The number of rightward collisions decreased when the participants used smartphones. The type of task had no effect on the lateral collision biases. These results were interpreted in terms of lateral attentional bias in peripersonal and extrapersonal spaces.
... In one study (Chabris et al., 2011), participants who jogged behind an experimenter and counted how many times the experimenter touched their head often failed to notice a fistfight staged along their route. Many pedestrians missed a clown unicycling near their path or money attached to a tree, especially if they were talking on a mobile phone at the time (Hyman et al., 2010;Hyman Jr. et al., 2014) People can even miss real objects that have practical consequences: Approximately 58% of police trainees and 33.3% of experienced police officers failed to notice a gun visible on the dashboard of a car during a simulated traffic stop (Simons & Schlosser, 2017). ...
... People tend to miss rare, but expected objects (e.g., Mitroff & Biggs, 2014;Wolfe et al., 2007). And, when people are distracted or attempting to multitask, they can miss events that they otherwise would report (e.g., Strayer et al., 2011;Hyman et al., 2010). The published literature includes many examples of missed incidental findings, but many do not specifically address failures of awareness due to inattentional blindness. ...
People often fail to notice unexpected stimuli when their attention is directed elsewhere. Most studies of this “inattentional blindness” have been conducted using laboratory tasks with little connection to real-world performance. Medical case reports document examples of missed findings in radiographs and CT images, unintentionally retained guidewires following surgery, and additional conditions being overlooked after making initial diagnoses. These cases suggest that inattentional blindness might contribute to medical errors, but relatively few studies have directly examined inattentional blindness in realistic medical contexts. We review the existing literature, much of which focuses on the use of augmented reality aids or inspection of medical images. Although these studies suggest a role for inattentional blindness in errors, most of the studies do not provide clear evidence that these errors result from inattentional blindness as opposed to other mechanisms. We discuss the design, analysis, and reporting practices that can make the contributions of inattentional blindness unclear, and we describe guidelines for future research in medicine and similar contexts that could provide clearer evidence for the role of inattentional blindness.
... In certain cases, however, pedestrians fail to notice important cues in traffic, causing risky crossing decisions. Such phenomenon can be explained by the concept of 'inattentional blindness' (IB), a cognitive phenomenon that humans fail to notice a distinct visual stimulus while engaging in tasks involving information processing by their working memory (Hyman et al., 2010). Simons and Chabris (1999) illustrated this phenomenon in their famous "invisible gorilla" experiment. ...
... In the context of traffic safety, IB among pedestrians has been quite commonly observed on roads as a result of technology use. For example, an earlier study found that pedestrians who were talking on the phone while walking had difficulty recognizing important information cues in their surroundings and failed to see a unicycling clown on their walking path (Hyman et al., 2010). ...
... Distracted pedestrians are more likely to unnecessarily wait at crossings and enter the intersection later in the green phase, not check left and right before crossing (Hyman et al., 2010;Lin & Huang, 2017), walk slowly (Agostini et al., 2015;Thompson et al., 2013), suffer from inattentional blindness (Gillette et al., 2016), and avoid eye contact with drivers of approaching vehicles (Hamann et al., 2017). Pedestrians who were distracted at the signalised intersection were more likely to take longer to start crossing (Byington & Schwebel, 2013;Gillette et al., 2016). ...
... It is well established that pedestrians who are distracted by their mobile phones display more illegal crossing behaviour, suffer from inattentional blindness (Gillette et al., 2016), avoid eye contact with drivers of approaching vehicles (Basch et al., 2014;Hamann et al., 2017), unnecessarily wait at intersections and enter the intersection later in the green phase (Hyman et al., 2010;Lin & Huang, 2017). Our research confirms those results. ...
... In certain cases, however, pedestrians fail to notice important cues in traffic, causing risky crossing decisions. Such phenomenon can be explained by the concept of 'inattentional blindness' (IB), a cognitive phenomenon that humans fail to notice a distinct visual stimulus while engaging in tasks involving information processing by their working memory (Hyman et al., 2010). Simons and Chabris (1999) illustrated this phenomenon in their famous "invisible gorilla" experiment. ...
... In the context of traffic safety, IB among pedestrians has been quite commonly observed on roads as a result of technology use. For example, an earlier study found that pedestrians who were talking on the phone while walking had difficulty recognizing important information cues in their surroundings and failed to see a unicycling clown on their walking path (Hyman et al., 2010). ...
In road traffic, mental overload often leads to a failure to notice new and distinctive stimuli. Such phenomenon is known as 'inattentional blindness'. Safe and efficient interaction between automated vehicles (AVs) and pedestrians is expected to rely heavily on external human-machine interfaces (eHMIs), a tool AVs are equipped with to communicate their intentions to pedestrians. This study seeks to explore the phenomenon of 'inattentional blindness' in the context of pedestrian-AV interactions. Specifically, the aim is to understand the effects of a warning eHMI on pedestrians' crossing decisions when they are engaged in a secondary task. In an experiment study with videos of pedestrian crossing scenarios filmed from the perspective of the crossing pedestrian, participants had to decide the latest point at which they would be willing to cross the road in front of an AV with an eHMI vs. an AV without an eHMI. Participants were also asked to predict the future behavior of the AV. 125 female and 9 male participants aged between 18 and 25 completed the experiment and a follow-up questionnaire. It was found that the presence of a warning eHMI on AVs contributes to a clearer understanding of pedestrians' inferences about the intention of AVs and helps deter late and dangerous crossing decisions made by pedestrians. However, the eHMI fail to help pedestrians avoid such decisions when they face a high mental workload induced by secondary task engagement.
... The results suggested a range of unsafe behavior; distracted pedestrians using their mobile phone were less likely to act in a cautionary way, i.e. looks left and right (Bungum, Day, and Henry 2005;Pešić et al. 2016) and they were less likely to wait for traffic to stop (Hatfield and Murphy 2007). Similar studies involving pedestrian distraction reported reduced situational awareness and increased ignorance of surroundings and even caused inattentional blindness (Hyman et al. 2009). Thompson et al. (2013) analyzed digital and social distraction and observed that pedestrians who were texting were 3.9 times more likely to exhibit at least one unsafe crossing behavior, whereas pedestrians conversing in groups were 1.69 times more likely to exhibit an unsafe crossing behavior. ...
... They were also less likely to look at traffic before crossing, wait for traffic to stop (at signalized crossings); however, they were more likely to wait for a vehicle to stop at unsignalized intersections (Hatfield and Murphy 2007). Another study on distraction reported no significant gender difference (Hyman et al. 2009). Further, a pedestrian's social status (single or in a group) during road crossing influences the distractive engagement. ...
The study primarily seeks to investigate the behavioral attribution of distraction in pedestrian road crossing. A distraction-themed questionnaire survey was conducted across Kolkata city, India, to understand the contribution of distraction to near-misses and injuries. The survey response showed that among all reported respondents, 13.7% (61) encountered at least one near-miss and 4.5% (20) experienced at least one accident in the past. The video-based observational field study of 2,360 pedestrians revealed that 28.7% of the pedestrians were distracted while crossing the road. Pedestrians who text walked relatively slowly and 7.9% more likely to violate signal. Additionally, mobile phone talkers were observed to be 4.5% more likely to nearly hit/bump into another oncoming pedestrian. The present study constitutes vital information for planners and policymakers and plays a pivotal role in identifying critical intersections and developing countermeasures to minimize the impact or occurrence of pedestrian distraction and unsafe behavior.
... Smartphones are undoubtedly beneficial in many ways, such as connecting with loved ones and supporting our productivity goals [3]. However, smartphone use has also been demonstrated to have negative influences in a number of important life outcomes, such as "real-world" social interactions [4], walking and driving abilities [5,6], and educational outcomes [7,8]. Other research demonstrates a negative association between smartphone overuse (i.e., more than 2 hours per day) and psychological well-being [9]. ...
... In conclusion, we found partial support to the proposal that cognitive control may be the mechanism for the effect of smartphone notifications reported in the literature, such as their potential unwanted interruption of social interactions [4], walking and driving [5,6], and educational activities [7,8]. Further research is needed to clarify the extent to which cognitive control serves as the primary underlying neural mechanism by which these smartphone interruptions negatively impact day-to-day outcomes. ...
Since their release in 2007, smartphones and their use have seemingly become a fundamental aspect of life in western society. Prior literature has suggested a link between mobile technology use and lower levels of cognitive control when people engage in a cognitively demanding task. This effect is more evident for people who report higher levels of smartphone use. The current study examined the effects of smartphones notifications on cognitive control and attention. Participants completed the Navon Letter paradigm which paired visual (frequent and rare target letters) and auditory (smartphone and control sounds) stimuli. We found that overall, participants responded slower on trials paired with smartphone notification (vs. control) sounds. They also demonstrated larger overall N2 ERP and a larger N2 oddball effect on trials paired with smartphone (vs. control) sounds, suggesting that people generally exhibited greater levels of cognitive control on the smartphone trials. In addition, people with higher smartphone addiction proneness showed lower P2 ERP on trials with the smartphone (vs. control) sounds, suggesting lower attentional engagement. These results add to the debate on the effects of smartphones on cognition. Limitations and future directions are discussed.
... According to the appraisal theory of empathy (Wondra & Ellsworth, 2015), a lack of attention causes "empathy failure." Prior study demonstrates that when individuals are using ICT, they are likely to exhibit "inattentional blindness" (Simons, 2000, p. 150) to other people in surrounding environment (Hyman et al., 2010), which means they may pay insufficient attention to the emotional situations of coworkers around them. Besides, even employees are using ICT for communication, they prefer to pay more attention to work-related contents and engage in fewer social interactions (Siampou et al., 2014;Wang et al., 2020). ...
... By contrast, we suggest that cooperative goal interdependence mitigates the negative relationship between ICT use intensity and empathy. Previous studies have found that when employees are using ICT, they easily ignore surroundings (Hyman et al., 2010). However, in the context of cooperative goal interdependence, employees show more concern for their coworkers (Wu et al., 2015). ...
The research explores a novel phenomenon in which information and communication technology (ICT), which is originally designed for knowledge transferring, may result in employees' knowledge hiding due to increasing use intensity. Specifically, drawing upon the appraisal theory of empathy, we develop a moderated mediation model of empathy linking ICT use intensity and knowledge hiding. The hypothesized model is tested by conducting a scenario-based experimental study (Study 1, N = 194) and a multi-wave field study (Study 2, N = 350). Results show that ICT use intensity is positively related to employees' knowledge hiding through the mediating role of their empathy. Moreover, competitive goal interdependence strengthens the negative relationship between ICT use intensity and employees' empathy, and the indirect positive effect between ICT use intensity and employees' knowledge hiding. Overall, the research answers the questions of how and when ICT use intensity may influence employees' knowledge hiding. Finally, the theoretical and practical implications of the research findings are discussed.
Supplementary information:
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10551-022-05245-4.
... For example, a study on the impact of distractions on pedestrian safety at the mid-block crosswalk at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte found that 16% of pedestrians were talking on the phone and 7% were texting while crossing a road [7]. Another study conducted at Western Washington University concluded that phone users often miss important visual cues, like a unicyclist, because their focus is on conversation [9]. ...
Pedestrian distraction poses significant risks at signalized intersections, especially in populated urban areas. This study investigates the primary causes of pedestrian distraction to determine the contributing factors affecting crossing behavior. Data were collected from ten signalized intersections by conducting in-person interviews, performing real-time observation, and reviewing video recordings. The study used binary logistic regression and Heuristic Bin analysis to examine different levels of distraction among pedestrians. Three major types of pedestrian distractions were identified: visual, auditory, and cognitive distractions. From the regression analysis, two models were developed to predict moderate and high levels of distraction based on factors such as age, intersection location, walking behavior, use of electronic devices, and awareness of traffic signals. The results indicated that smartphone usage and earphones were the predominant sources of distraction. Pedestrians walking in pairs demonstrated higher levels of distraction than those walking alone or in groups. Heuristic Bins analysis revealed that females were slightly more distracted than males while walking alone, in pairs, or in a group. Pedestrians also tended to be more distracted when they were walking in pairs than when walking alone or in groups.
... Research findings that support this premise are abundant. For example, multiple studies demonstrate that smartphone presence and use diminish attention resources (Hyman et al., 2010;Thornton et al., 2014), thereby preventing the partner who is using their smartphone (i.e., the phubber) from fully engaging with their partner as well (in this case, the phubbee). Additionally, the reduced eye contact resulting from phubbing is often interpreted as a lack of commitment to the phubbee (Halpern & Katz, 2017) leaving the phubbee feeling excluded (Hales et al., 2018). ...
In today’s digital age, the pervasive presence of digital technology (e.g., mobile devices, social media platforms) has profoundly impacted our social lives. These technologies offer many opportunities for the initiation, maintenance, and even the dissolution of romantic relationships, but also introduce challenges. It has become increasingly complex to navigate the intricacies and vulnerabilities inherent to (building) romantic connections in online settings. As a consequence, hurtful experiences may lie in wait. This dissertation provides a thorough exploration of recent research findings, including my own, on various forms of harmful technology use that may occur in adults’ romantic relationships. Specifically, this dissertation focuses on six distinct phenomena: harmful sexting, catfishing, partner phubbing, electronic partner surveillance, online infidelity, and ghosting. Drawing from prior research findings as well as my own, each phenomenon is examined through the lens of (1) its conceptualization, (2) the characteristics of individuals involved in the behaviour, and (3) the underlying mechanisms and motivations driving these harmful technology practices.
... Another study showed that mobile phones cause distraction by reducing situational awareness and increasing inattentional blindness. The mobile phone users did not recognise other people, changed direction more often despite walking more slowly and even failed to notice a clown riding a unicycle on their route (24). In the present study, 85.5% of individuals who exhibited distracted walking were somehow paying attention to their mobile phones. ...
Objective: Distracted walking is defined as any activity that diverts a pedestrian's attention from walking. The increasing addiction to mobile phone use has recently led to a rise in dangerous accidents caused by distracted walking. This study aimed to assess the prevalence and preventable causes of distracted walking among high school students crossing intersections with pedestrian crossings. Material and Methods: High school students (n=3237) between the ages of 14 and 18 from 10 different high schools, including 5 high schools in the Müze crossing area and 5 high schools in the Belediye crossing area, were observed while crossing the pedestrian crossing. Poisson regression was applied to determine the association between distracted walking and various factors, including the city, average household income in the surrounding area, type of pedestrian crossing, and the gender of pedestrians. Results: A total of 3237 students were observed walking near 10 high schools in the city centre of Turkey, of whom 1514 exhibited distracted walking (45.77%). The estimated prevalence of distracted walking was 45.77% (95% CI 45.06-48.49%). Of the students who exhibited distracted walking, 85.5% were engaged in some way with their mobile phones. The highest rate was observed in the group looking down and/or using their phones (62.81%). Conclusion: Our study reveals striking results about the distracted walking behavior of pedestrians in dense urban areas. The high rate of distracted walking among students indicates significant pedestrian-oriented security weaknesses. This study underscores the importance of addressing distracted walking to improve pedestrian safety and prevent potential accidents in urban environments.
... The results clearly showed that performing these activities significantly reduces the awareness of passers-by performing these activities and increases the likelihood of collisions with motor vehicles. In an article (Hyman et al., 2010;Schwebel et al., 2012), the authors conducted an observational study on women and men who were crossing the road and found that both time crossing the road while using the phone increased, and thus the likelihood of a vehicle accident increased. In an article (Campisi et al., 2022) conducted a study to determine the impact of technology-induced distraction on pedestrian behavior at crossings. ...
The use of hand-held mobile phones by drivers and pedestrians is common and is becoming more common every year. Mobile phones have become an integral part of our everyday life, accompanying us in almost every respect. Modern smartphones perform functions that go far beyond their original purpose as devices for making telephone calls. We use them for GPS navigation and electronic banking. Moreover, using mobile applications, we can make purchases and sales of products quickly and safely. The number of people owning mobile phones is growing all over the world, and access to the Internet, which is an integral part of the functioning of modern smartphones, is becoming more and more common. Basic functions of mobile phones, such as making and receiving calls or sending short SMS messages, have long ceased to be sufficient. Thanks to them, we can conduct videoconferences, use advanced applications for time management or health monitoring, and even perform complex professional tasks in mobile mode. Thus, the growing popularity and versatility of mobile phones make them an indispensable tool in our everyday lives, not only as a means of communication, but also as an irreplaceable source of information, a work tool and a facilitation in everyday activities. The aim of the article is to find out respondents' predispositions to use telephones made of corrugated cardboard during activities such as walking on the street, side of the road, sidewalk, while crossing a pedestrian crossing and while driving. The lack of statistics on road accidents caused by the use of a telephone makes it difficult to determine how big a problem it is to use a telephone in situations where we should maintain limited trust in other road users. The research shows that respondents use a mobile phone while crossing a pedestrian crossing or driving a vehicle. In addition, as many as 19% of respondents admit that they have crossed a pedestrian crossing at least once. The conducted surveys and observational studies constitute an introduction to the development of a system for detecting pedestrians and drivers using mobile phones.
... They pointed out that the cognitive distraction caused by voice call decreased pedestrians' situational awareness and practical observation of the surrounding environment during walking. Hyman et al. found that compared with nondistracted pedestrians, when pedestrians use mobile phones, they change their walking direction more frequently, are less likely to pay attention to other pedestrians around their walking path, and may even have inattentive blindness, ignoring unusual events happening along the way, such as clowns riding unicycles (10). In a subsequent study by Hyman et al., this was verified, and pedestrians distracted by voice call and text messaging on mobile phones were less likely to notice the banknotes placed in advance by the researchers on trees along the road (11). ...
Vision is the most crucial human sense, accounting for most of the external information pedestrians receive while crossing the street from visual sources. However, distracted mobile phone usage during street crossing consumes pedestrians' cognitive resources and diverts their visual attention. As a result, pedestrians may be unable to fully concentrate on observing the traffic environment and effectively planning their crossing path and behavior. This study evaluated the effect of pedestrian behavioral activities at the street crossing on eye movement (EM) characteristics. The crossing tasks are natural behavior, voice talking, text messaging, and music listening. The tasks were further categorized as simple or complex. A total of 29 participants were recruited in Nanjing, including 18 males (62.1%) and 11 females (37.9%) with an average age of 23.59 years (SD = 2.44). The Friedman test was used to analyze differences in saccade frequency, fixation time, browsing number and browsing time across different scenarios. Then, text messaging had the most significant impact on pedestrians' EM characteristics, followed by voice talking, and music listening had a relatively weaker effect. The secondary task difficulty influenced the percentage of browsing, viewing, and to some extent, gaze time. On the other hand, music rhythm and style only partially influenced the percentage of gaze and gaze time. Furthermore, mobile phones substantially affected pedestrians' EM characteristics and attention allocation for the same secondary task difficulty. These findings contribute to a better understanding of pedestrians' visual characteristics under distracted mobile phone usage conditions and provide valuable insights for developing appropriate measures to enhance pedestrian safety.
... This might explain reduced inattentional blindness for meaningful stimuli like one's own name, as well as priming effects (Mack & Rock, 1998). Some IAB paradigms attempt to overcome these issues by making the unexpected stimulus sufficiently shocking (a gorilla, a unicycling clown, money on a tree) to make forgetting unlikely; nonetheless, observers often fail to become aware of the unexpected stimulus (Simons & Chabris, 1999;Hyman, Boss, Wise, McKenzie, & Caggiano, 2010;Hyman, Sarb, & Wise-Swanson, 2014). Interestingly, in some studies, even though observers fail to report the unexpected stimulus, they move to avoid a collision, suggesting that perception occurs (Tractinsky & Shinar, 2008;Hyman et al., 2014). ...
Research on visual attention has uncovered significant anomalies, and some traditional methods may have inadvertently probed peripheral vision rather than attention. Vision science needs to rethink visual attention from the ground up. To facilitate this, for a year I banned the word “attention” in my lab. This constraint promoted a more precise discussion of attention-related phenomena, capacity limits, and mechanisms. The insights gained lead me to challenge attributing to “attention” those phenomena that can be better explained by perceptual processes, are predictable by an ideal observer model, or that otherwise may not require an additional mechanism. I enumerate a set of critical phenomena in need of explanation. Finally, I propose a unifying theory in which all perception results from performing a task, and tasks face a limit on complexity.
... The effect of distraction on pedestrians shares some similarities to those experienced by distracted drivers (Hyman et al., 2010); however, the influence of distraction on safe walking behavior has not been extensively studied. Distracted pedestrians often allocate greater visual attention to the front rather than the periphery of their surroundings (Tapiro et al., 2020). ...
The concept of distracted pedestrians and its impact on highway safety has gained increasing attention in recent years. However, studies focusing exclusively on distracted pedestrian crashes are less pervasive than distracted driving. In addition, most prior studies investigate the harmful effect of cellphone usage while walking, without considering other forms of pedestrian distraction. Also, the existing literature provides limited knowledge on comprehending the affinities between pedestrian distraction and safety consequences. This study aims to reveal the chain of contributing factors involved in distracted pedestrian crashes, considering both pedestrian severity levels and specific distraction-related tasks. Ten years (2010-2019) of related crashes were extracted from the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development (LADOTD) database, and association rule mining (ARM) was applied to identify the meaningful crash patterns. Different distracting activities of pedestrians were introduced from the narratives of police-investigated crash reports. The study findings exhibit the complex nature of distracted pedestrian crashes by highlighting the intricate relationships between risk factors. On road segments, distracted male pedestrians aged 41-64 were more likely to be fatal/severely injured in dark-not-lighted conditions. Crashes involving pedestrians using electronic devices were often found at intersections. Distractions caused by pets, persons, or objects were strongly associated with crossing segments in rural settings. In-person conversation while standing on roadways in urban residential locations without traffic controls was found to increase vulnerability. Working on vehicles while wearing dark clothes and in dark-not-lighted conditions was identified as an influential factor in crash occurrence. Moreover, careless or inattentive actions of pedestrians while playing on the road segments were associated with a high likelihood of crashes. These study outcomes are crucial in uncovering the coexisting crash characteristics related to distracted pedestrians, which can be helpful in targeting and developing effective educational, design, and enforcement strategies to improve pedestrian safety.
... Failure in change detection is more likely to arise when attention is diverted or overloaded (Hyman et al., 2010). Errors can also occur due to the repetitive nature of driving, when the environmental circumstances allow it (for example in environments with very low visuospatial complexity), making drivers more susceptible to errors caused by inattention and distractions (Duncan et al., 1991;Shinar et al., 1998;Wickens, 2002). ...
How do the limits of high-level visual processing affect human performance in naturalistic, dynamic settings of (multimodal) interaction where observers can draw on experience to strategically adapt attention to familiar forms of complexity? In this backdrop, we investigate change detection in a driving context to study attentional allocation aimed at overcoming environmental complexity and temporal load. Results indicate that visuospatial complexity substantially increases change blindness but also that participants effectively respond to this load by increasing their focus on safety-relevant events, by adjusting their driving, and by avoiding non-productive forms of attentional elaboration, thereby also controlling “looked-but-failed-to-see” errors. Furthermore, analyses of gaze patterns reveal that drivers occasionally, but effectively, limit attentional monitoring and lingering for irrelevant changes. Overall, the experimental outcomes reveal how drivers exhibit effective attentional compensation in highly complex situations. Our findings uncover implications for driving education and development of driving skill-testing methods, as well as for human-factors guided development of AI-based driving assistance systems.
... Longer screen time has been associated with shorter sleep and poor sleep quality and efficiency [3]. Several studies have studied the effects of smartphone use on various aspects of cognition [1,6,11]. In the face of all this evidence, the HCI community has been developing interventions for the regulation of technology use, overuse, and misuse, resulting in various interventions targeting smartphone usage behavior. ...
Digital mindfulness applications and tools are increasingly developed to improve the wellbeing of technology users. In this study, we present Chai, an Android live wallpaper application designed to reduce absent-minded smartphone usage. The wallpaper is designed as a tree whose leaves undergo color change and fall off based on the frequency of smartphone use. We also present the result of an initial pilot study conducted using the application. The participants reported increased awareness of their smartphone use behavior and found the wallpaper and the other features of the application to be persuasive at varying degrees.
... Another consideration drivers would use to surmise pedestrians' crossing intention was their distance from the curb, irrespective of the walking direction; drivers would automatically presume pedestrians to have an intention to cross if they were within a few steps from the curb since pedestrians are capable of suddenly changing their trajectory. It has been shown that distracted pedestrians are 75% more likely to suddenly change trajectory (Hyman et al., 2010). Factors categorized as the state of the pedestrian, including trajectory, walking pattern, speed, and attention have been used to predict crossing intentions (Rasouli & Tsotsos, 2020). ...
The use of personal listening devices (PLDs) is most prevalent among the college attending population. PLDs can be quite distracting, especially when its users are performing focused tasks such as street crossings. Such scenarios are commonplace on campuses of rural higher education institutes, where students must cross multiple unsignalized crosswalks to get to their destination. To evaluate the dangers of PLD use and pedestrian behavior while navigating crosswalks, 1274 pedestrians were systematically observed over nine hours at four crosswalks; naturalistic observations were followed by a survey of 135 pedestrians, and two focus groups with a total of eight participants following a unique three-stage protocol. Results show that societal distractions such as crossing in group settings or talking with other members of a group while crossing led to more risky pedestrian behavior, than did technological distractors such as PLDs or cellphone use. There was also a consensus on hand gesture meanings for pedestrian-driver communication despite the presence of relatively diverse population. Findings from this study can serve as guidelines to develop external human machine interfaces (eHMIs) for automated vehicles, and appropriate countermeasures to reduce pedestrian distractions at crosswalks of higher education institutes.
... There are some factors that can cause the accidents and fatalities among pedestrians where the most of road accidents involving pedestrian occurred due to pedestrian's carelessness (Abdul Hanan et al. 2015;Petzoldt, 2014;Hyman et al. 2010). Adbel-Aty and Radwan (2000) states that 95% of road accident occurs due to human factor. ...
Road accidents among pedestrian become an important issue that needs to be mitigated due to high injuries and fatalities cases. Pedestrian is a weakest group of people compared to the drivers because they are not fully protected. The accidents involving pedestrian may occur due to their own negative crossing behaviour. This study is purposely to identify the effectiveness of theory of planned behaviour (TPB) in predicting pedestrian behaviour. TPB has three main constructs which are attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control that significant to behavioural intention. Some studies used extended TPB by adding other constructs such as moral norms, perceived risk, conformity tendency, perceived severity, and past behaviour to predict pedestrian behaviour more accurately. This study used a literature approach where some of the previous studies are examined and the results of the studies are being analysed using descriptive analysis. The results show that TPB is suitable to predict pedestrian behaviour because the constructs are significant and comply with its fit. This study also shows that pedestrian behaviours are differ according to their age and gender. Most of previous studied states that young people tends to perform risky behaviours compared to old people. Children pedestrian are more vulnerable and have a high tendency to involve in road accidents and have a high fatality risk. Men are more risk-taking compared to women and men have high tendency to violate road regulations and exposed to injuries and fatality while women have more positive crossing behaviour.
... Mutation of physical world perception due to time and cognitive demand of user interaction with mobile phone visual interfaces has been a research field for many years (Hyman et al., 2009). Researchers attempt to point to the real world with their devices to reduce the time and effort in seeking of information procedure. ...
... There are a limited number of passive-observation studies that examine smartphone usage in public spaces. A 2010 study on cellphone users in public space focus on talking whilst walking showed that cell phone usage can cause "inattentional blindness" (Hyman et al. 2010). Another passive-observation study held in 2015 (Hampton et al. 2015) revealed that the percentage of people who use a mobile phone in public space is not dominant and people tends more to use a smartphone when they are walking alone comparing to being with groups (Hampton et al. 2015). ...
... Another consideration drivers would use to surmise pedestrians' crossing intention was their distance from the curb, irrespective of the walking direction; drivers would automatically presume pedestrians to have an intention to cross if they were within a few steps from the curb since pedestrians are capable of suddenly changing their trajectory. It has been shown that distracted pedestrians are 75% more likely to suddenly change trajectory (Hyman et al., 2010). Factors categorized as the state of the pedestrian, including trajectory, walking pattern, speed, and attention have been used to predict crossing intentions (Rasouli & Tsotsos, 2020). ...
... A slight distraction can cause inattentional blindness and hinder the main task. For example, phone usage during walking can lead to inattentional blindness during tasks with just low cognitive demands (Hyman et al. 2010). We do not just ignore trivia objects but also the safety relevant visual stimuli (Murphy and Greene 2015). ...
Mixed reality technology has been increasingly used for navigation. While most MR-based navigation systems are currently based on hand-held devices, for example, smartphones, head-mounted MR devices have become more and more popular in navigation. Much research has been conducted to investigate the navigation experience in MR. However, it is still unclear how ordinary users react to the first-person view and FOV (field of view)-limited navigation experience, especially in terms of spatial learning. In our study, we investigate how visualization in MR navigation affects spatial learning. More specifically, we test two related hypotheses: incorrect virtual information can lead users into incorrect spatial learning, and the visualization style of direction can influence users’ spatial learning and experience. We designed a user interface in Microsoft HoloLens 2 and conducted a user study with 40 participants. The user study consists of a walking session in which users wear Microsoft HoloLens 2 to navigate to an unknown destination, pre- and post-walking questionnaires, sketch map drawing, and a semi-structured interview about the user interface design. The results provide preliminary confirmation that users’ spatial learning can be misled by incorrect information, even in a small study area, but this misleading effect can be compensated by considerate visualization, for example, including lines instead of using only arrows as direction indicators. Arrows with or without lines as two visualization alternatives also influenced the user’s spatial learning and evaluation of the designed elements. Besides, the study shows that users’ preferences for navigation interfaces are diverse, and an adaptable interface should be provided. The results contribute to the design of head-mounted MR-based navigation interfaces and the application of MR in navigation in general.
... However, the second-highest number of accidents (22%) occurs when pedestrians dart out of somewhere suddenly. According to the Hyman et al. [26], the distraction caused by 265 electronic devices can make pedestrians less attentive. Consequently, they could either change their walking direction or walking speed unintentionally. ...
Road accident data includes detailed information about incidents that occurred, such as where they happened, the severity of the accident, and the number of people on the road at the time. Such information is useful in determining the causes of accidents and developing potential countermeasures. This research aims to determine the factors that contribute to pedestrian fatalities and injuries in traffic accidents. This study examined 150 pedestrian-vehicle accidents that took place between 1990 and 2021 in forty countries. Eleven factors have been identified as the major causes of accidents. The categorical principal component analysis (CATPCA) technique is used to reduce the number of dimensions and identify the elements that contribute to accidents. The eleven variables are classified into three groups: human factors, roadway environment, and vehicle attributes. The study found that car speed, weather, lighting, traffic conditions, area types, accident locations, and road conditions all had a significant impact on pedestrian accidents and fatalities. The findings show that a pedestrian's state (walking, running) and intention significantly increase the risk of serious injuries and death. The analysis of the driver's status suggests that the driver's intentions may also play a role in car accidents. This is an open access article under the CC BY-SA license.
... Etwa die Hälfte der Teilnehmenden bemerkt diese Person aber nicht, weil sie mit einer anderen Aufgabe, nämlich dem Zählen von Pässen zwischen Spieler*innen eines Teams, beschäftigt ist. Wenn wir uns nun vor Augen führen, wie oft Personen beispielsweise unterwegs an ihrem Mobiltelefon sind, wird schnell deutlich, dass dieser Effekt für Zeugenaussagen in der Praxis durchaus von Bedeutung sein kann (siehe z.B.Hyman et al., 2010).Wird der Sichtkontakt von einem Bild zum nächsten unterbrochen, bemerken wir zudem viele kleinere (z.B. Person trägt nun anstelle eines Hemdes ein T-Shirt), aber auch größere Veränderungen (uns steht plötzlich eine andere Person gegenüber) nicht(Simons & Levin, 1997). ...
... Taking into consideration research findings so far, the type and level of distraction depends on the performed phone task. For instance, talking on the phone is considered to be a cognitively-demanding task that can affect situational and environmental awareness (Hatfield and Murphy, 2007;Hyman et al., 2010;Neider et al., 2010;Tapiro et al., 2016). Texting, gaming or using apps can reduce visual attention as the user's attention is mainly engaged on the phone screen rather than on environmental surroundings Chen et al., 2017;2018;Feld and Plummer, 2019;Haga et al., 2015;Jiang et al., 2018;Krasovsky et al., 2017;Lin and Huang, 2017;Magnani et al., 2017;Tapiro et al., 2016), increasing traffic lights violation and the probability of a collision with a vehicle. ...
During the last decades, distraction caused by mobile phones has created concerns about pedestrians' safety, especially while crossing a road. The aim of this paper is to investigate the factors that have an effect on the crossing duration of pedestrians, distracted by mobile phone use, at both signalized and unsignalized crossings. Pedestrians with mobile phones were observed during crossing the aforementioned types of crossings in Thessaloniki, Greece, while their crossing duration was further examined via the development of Bayesian regression models, one for unsignalized and one for signalized crossings. For the research purposes, 554 pedestrians were observed at unsignalized crossings and 409 at signalized ones. The most commonly observed type of distraction was talking on the mobile phone, while texting was also found to be very common. The variables, found to be associated with crossing duration, were significantly different between unsignalized and signalized crossings. Crossing duration at unsignalized crossings seemed to be affected by the experience of a potential conflict with a motorized vehicle and the presence of additional distractors, such as the carrying of an object and the presence of company. At signalized crossings, duration tended to be influenced by the age of the pedestrian and the position before crossing. Current research contributes in understanding and modeling distracted pedestrians' behavior when crossing streets.
Echolocating bats can navigate complex 3D environments by integrating prior knowledge of spatial layouts and real-time sensory cues. This study demonstrates that inattentional blindness to sensory information undermines successful navigation in Egyptian fruit bats, Rousettus aegyptiacus, a species that has access to vision and echolocation to traverse natural environments. Bats flew over repeated trials to a perch at a fixed location in the light, allowing them to navigate using both vision and echolocation. The experiment was then repeated in the dark to exclude the bat’s use of vision. The perch was subsequently displaced by either 15 or 30 cm in one of six different directions (up, down, left, right, front, back). Echolocation behavior was recorded using a 25-channel microphone array, while flight paths were tracked using 13 motion capture cameras. The directional aim of echolocation clicks served as a metric for the bat’s spatial attention to locations in their environment. In the light, bats modified their flight paths to successfully land on a perch that was moved 15 cm but surprisingly, often failed to land on it when displaced by 30 cm. In the dark, bats often failed to land on the perch after it was moved by only 15 cm. Landing failures suggest that learned spatial priors invoked inattentional blindness to changes in the environment, which interfered with successful navigation. In both the light and dark, when bats failed to land on the perch at its new location, they directed their attention toward the original perch position. Performance differences in the light and dark suggest that the bat’s attentional spotlight may be narrower when it relies on echolocation than vision. To our knowledge, these findings provide the first evidence of inattentional blindness in a flying echolocating animal, demonstrating that spatial priors can dominate sensory processing during navigation.
Az okoseszközök jelenléte mindennapjaink szerves része. Használatuk gyakorta megzavarja szemtől szembeni társas érintkezéseinket, mely jelenséget McDaniel és Coyne (2016) találóan a magyarul is intuitíven jól értelmezhető technoferencia kifejezéssel írták le. Téma-összefoglaló tanulmányunk empirikus kutatások áttekintésén keresztül mutatja be a technoferencia fogalmát és relevanciáját. Az okoseszközök által megzavart társas interakciók jellegzetességeit kapcsolati, párkapcsolati, szülő-gyermek kapcsolati, valamint munka-magánélet kontextusában tárgyaljuk. Összességében megállapítható, hogy a technoferencia minden életkorban jelentős rizikófaktor a társas kapcsolatok minősége és a mentális egészség szempontjából. A felsorakoztatott munkákhoz kapcsolódóan kitérünk a téma gyakorlati relevanciáira, és áttekintjük a további lehetséges és szükséges kutatási irányokat.
Electronic screens are ubiquitous in daily life and support everyday activities in different contexts. Moderate screen use is crucial to individuals' physical and mental health in modern society, while empirical research has verified the potential of altering psychology and behavioral choices by improving micro-environmental qualities. With the hypothesis that the ever-changing contexts may influence people's screen behavior, this article explores how design interventions in these micro-environments can promote healthier and more balanced screen use. To achieve this, the fundamental step is understanding how people utilize screens in diverse contexts, including indoor and outdoor spaces in free-living scenarios. Despite its importance, current literature offers limited methodologies for precisely examining screen behaviors and their contexts simultaneously. To address this gap, this study proposes an automated method with wearable cameras and Computer Vision technologies to quantify screen exposure and related daily contexts extracted from the collected life-logging images (N = 30,186). “Indoor” and “desk” are found to be positively associated with the occurrence of screen behavior. Conversely, “greenery,” “crowd,” “travel,” and “food” exhibit robust and negative relationships with screen exposure. This study offers a new approach to objectively and automatically measure screen exposure, enhancing efficiency and reliability over conventional methods. Moreover, it establishes a replicable framework for future research on broader datasets and informs the fields of architectural and urban design on molding healthier and more balanced screen use among individuals.
The study of consciousness has developed well-controlled, rigorous methods for manipulating and measuring consciousness. Yet, in the process, experimental paradigms grew farther away from everyday conscious and unconscious processes, which raises the concern of ecological validity. In this review, we suggest that the field can benefit from adopting a more ecological approach, akin to other fields of cognitive science. There, this approach challenged some existing hypotheses, yielded stronger effects, and enabled new research questions. We argue that such a move is critical for studying consciousness, where experimental paradigms tend to be artificial and small effect sizes are relatively prevalent. We identify three paths for doing so—changing the stimuli and experimental settings, changing the measures, and changing the research questions themselves—and review works that have already started implementing such approaches. While acknowledging the inherent challenges, we call for increasing ecological validity in consciousness studies.
People often fail to notice unexpected objects and events when they are performing an attention-demanding task, a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness. We might expect individual differences in cognitive ability or personality to predict who will and will not notice unexpected objects given that people vary in their ability to perform attention-demanding tasks. We conducted a comprehensive literature search for empirical inattentional blindness reports and identified 38 records that included individual difference measures and met our inclusion criteria. From those, we extracted individual difference effect sizes for 31 records which included a total of 74 distinct, between-groups samples with at least one codable individual difference measure. We conducted separate meta-analyses of the relationship between noticing/missing an unexpected object and scores on each of the 14 cognitive and 19 personality measures in this dataset. We also aggregated across personality measures reflecting positive/negative affectivity or openness/absorption and cognitive measures of interference, attention breadth, and memory. Collectively, these meta-analyses provided little evidence that individual differences in ability or personality predict noticing of an unexpected object. A robustness analysis that excluded samples with extremely low numbers of people who noticed or missed produced similar results. For most measures, the number of samples and the total sample sizes were small, and larger studies are needed to examine individual differences in inattentional blindness more systematically. However, the results are consistent with the idea that noticing of unexpected objects or events differs from deliberate attentional control tasks in that it is not reliably predicted by individual differences in cognitive ability.
To investigate differences in the safety behaviours of distracted and non-distracted pedestrians crossing roads, an unobtrusive observational study was conducted in Leicestershire, UK. Video recordings were taken of 1409 pedestrians crossing roads at controlled and uncontrolled crossing sites, both on a university campus and in urbanised town centre locations. On average, 42% of pedestrians were visibly distracted while crossing, and distracted pedestrians demonstrated significantly fewer safety behaviours than non-distracted pedestrians. They generally took longer to cross the road and made fewer looks towards the traffic environment, particularly at controlled crossings. Of all distraction activities, talking to another pedestrian had the most negative impact on safety behaviours. The findings highlight areas requiring further investigation, including distraction behaviours such as engaging with other pedestrians and supervising children. The results also identify that controlled crossings may benefit from targeted interventions to improve pedestrian safety.
Perception and attention are processes that are closely linked. Perceptual processes involve the reception and processing of information via sensory channels, while attentional processes prioritize certain perceptual contents by selectively amplifying some pieces of information and weakening others. Prioritized processing is essential because our (at least conscious) processing capacity is limited. In this chapter, basic theoretical models of perception and attention are outlined, and their applications in sport are explained. Moreover, relevant sport-specific research is presented along with an appraisal of whether perception and attention can be trained. A comprehensive understanding of perception and attention processes, as well as the potential ways to enhance them, is crucial, especially for sports that take place in complex environments (such as ball and team sports).
Integrative processing is traditionally believed to be dependent on consciousness. While earlier studies within the last decade reported many types of integration under subliminal conditions (i.e. without perceptual awareness), these findings are widely challenged recently. This review evaluates the current evidence for 10 types of subliminal integration that are widely studied: arithmetic processing, object‐context integration, multi‐word processing, same‐different processing, multisensory integration and 5 different types of associative learning. Potential methodological issues concerning awareness measures are also taken into account. It is concluded that while there is currently no reliable evidence for subliminal integration, this does not necessarily refute ‘unconscious’ integration defined through non‐subliminal (e.g. implicit) approaches.
Number of people, density and so on are often used as a risk indicator in crowd dynamic risk management, but crowd size cannot truly reflect the change process of psychological stress perception that leads to crowd behavior disorder. Therefore, this research calculates risk index thresholds from the perspective of psychological stress perception to help managers assess crowd-gathering risks. On the one hand, the behavior model and psychological stress perception model are constructed based on corresponding experiments at the micro layer. On the other hand, risk decision models, including the average density and phubbers ratio, are built at the macro level. Finally, a long subway transfer channel was used as a simulation scenario, and the critical value of the decision quantity was determined by taking the psychological stress perception of the crowd as the objective function. The simulation shows that the perceived pressure of the crowd changes nonlinearly with time. The simulation result of the critical threshold can be divided into four zones, namely, the safety area, warning area, disposal area and dangerous area, so that managers can take targeted measures. The results are validated by applying psychological stress perception to practical population risk management.
Objectives
Distracted walking is a major cause of pedestrian road traffic injuries, but little is known about how distraction affects pedestrian safety. The study was designed to explore how visual and auditory distraction might influence pedestrian safety.
Methods
Three experiments were conducted to explore causal mechanisms from two theoretical perspectives, increased cognitive load from the distraction task and resource competition in the same sensory modality. Pedestrians’ behavior patterns and cortex oxyhemoglobin changes were recorded while they performed a series of dual tasks.
Results
Four primary results emerged: (a) participants responded more slowly to both visual and auditory stimuli in traffic, as well as walked more slowly, while talking on the phone or text messaging compared to when undistracted or listening to music; (b) when participants completed pedestrian response tasks while distracted with a high cognitive load, their response was significantly slower and poorer than when they carried out a lower cognitive load distraction task, (c) participants had higher levels of oxy-Hb change in cortices related to visual processing and executive function while distracted with a higher cognitive load; and (d) participants' responses to traffic lights were slower and resulted in a higher activation in prefrontal cortex and occipital areas when distracted by a visual distraction task compared to when distracted with an auditory task; similarly, brain activation increased significantly in temporal areas when participants responded to an auditory car horn task compared to when they responded to visual traffic lights.
Conclusions
Both distracting cognitive load demands and the type of distraction task significantly affect young adult pedestrian performance and threaten pedestrian safety. Pedestrian injury prevention efforts should consider the effects of the type of distracting task and its cognitive demands on pedestrian safety.
Studies have repeatedly highlighted the inferior performance of mobile users relative to that of personal computer (PC) users, largely due to lower usability and higher search costs arising from the use of smaller screens. Research, however, has yet to substantively address the situation in which mobile users perform tasks that require information processing without information search, implying an absence of device-related performance differences in such situations. Against this background, we propose that mobile task performance may be inferior in cognitive tasks, even when usability and search costs cannot be used as explanatory mechanisms, due to the predisposition of users to process information differently on different devices. We provide evidence in support of this proposition in two experiments. We find that mobile users perform worse (less accurately) than PC users do when the tasks demand high cognitive load. By contrast, when the tasks demand low cognitive load, performance is comparable across devices. We observe this interaction effect for different types of cognitive load – intrinsic and extraneous – despite their opposite effects on task performance. In so doing, we extend existing explanations of mobile task performance and shed light on the boundary conditions under which mobile use negatively affects task performance.
The growing prevalence of technological distractions amongst pedestrians makes it an important road safety concern. Observational studies are considered a reliable method to investigate the influence of mobile phone distraction on pedestrian road crossing behaviour and crash risks. The present study conducts a systematic review of international literature on pedestrian distraction observations by following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. A total of 792 studies were identified from the literature search on six research databases: Scopus, Google Scholar, Web of Science, PubMed, Cochrane library, and Transportation Research International Documentation (TRID). Finally, 39 research articles were assessed using the systematic classification scheme based on the following five research aspects: prevalence of mobile phone distraction, study locations, performance measures, analysis techniques, and additional factors associated with mobile phone use among pedestrians. Over 35% of the studies were conducted in the United States of America (USA) and 69% of the investigations were done in the last five years. Overall, the findings across the studies indicate that mobile phone distraction plays a major role in pedestrian risky road crossing behaviour and violation tendencies. Visual distractions (such as texting) exhibited higher behavioural impairment compared to cognitive distractions (e.g., listening to music, and conversations). Pedestrian characteristics such as gender and age were the key factors examined in 77% and 67% of the observational studies. Finally, important directions for future research are illustrated to aid the researchers working in the area of pedestrian safety.
The 1st of 2 experiments with a total of 8 undergraduates examined whether Ss would take intermittent advantage of the redundancy of stories to switch to a writing task. Some Ss were trained to copy words while reading highly redundant material (short stories); others were trained with less redundant encyclopedia articles. On reaching criterion, each S was switched to the other type of reading material. Three of the 4 Ss trained with stories transferred their skill immediately to the encyclopedia, suggesting that they had not been using the redundancy of the stories to accomplish their task. In Exp II, 2 Ss were trained to copy complete sentences while reading. Several tests then showed that they understood the meaning of the sentences. Results strengthen the hypothesis that the ability to divide attention is constrained primarily by the individual's level of skill, not by the size of a fixed pool of resources. Postulated capacity limits may provide plausible accounts of unskilled performance but fail to explain the achievements of practiced individuals. (39 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Subjects looked at two optically superimposed video sccreens, on which two different kinds of things were happening. In the principal condition, they were required to follow the action in one episode (by pressing keys when significant events occurred) and ignore the other. They could do this without difficulty, although both were present in the same fully overlapped visual field. Odd events in the unattended episode were rarely noticed. It was very difficult to monitor both episodes at once. Performance was no better when the two episodes were presented to different eyes (dichoptic condition) than when both were given binocularly. It is argued that selective attention does not involve special mechanisms to reject unwanted information, but is a direct consequence of skilled perceiving.
Using a closed-circuit driving track environment, we investigated the influence of using a hands-free mobile (or cell) phone on various biomechanical and perceptual factors that underlie the control of driving. Results showed that in three tasks representative of everyday driving conditions, the perceptual control of action was compromised when compared to a control condition where no mobile phone conversation was present. While conversing, critical control actions related to braking were postponed on approach to a corner. During controlled braking, as when approaching a stationary car at a traffic light, the degree of braking was reduced and braking style was altered in a non-optimal manner. During an obstacle avoidance task, car dynamics were affected as a result of the conversation. Interpretation of the results is motivated by the ecological approach to perception–action and the theory of affordances. It is concluded that a driver’s sensitivity to prospective information about upcoming events and the associated perception and awareness of what the road environment affords may both significantly be degraded when simultaneously using a hands-free mobile phone. Implications for intervention and policy are discussed.
This study examines how conversing with passengers in a vehicle differs from conversing on a cell phone while driving. We compared how well drivers were able to deal with the demands of driving when conversing on a cell phone, conversing with a passenger, and when driving without any distraction. In the conversation conditions, participants were instructed to converse with a friend about past experiences in which their life was threatened. The results show that the number of driving errors was highest in the cell phone condition; in passenger conversations more references were made to traffic, and the production rate of the driver and the complexity of speech of both interlocutors dropped in response to an increase in the demand of the traffic. The results indicate that passenger conversations differ from cell phone conversations because the surrounding traffic not only becomes a topic of the conversation, helping driver and passenger to share situation awareness, but the driving condition also has a direct influence on the complexity of the conversation, thereby mitigating the potential negative effects of a conversation on driving.
Subjects in a selective-looking paradigm (Neisser & Becklen, 1975) attended to one of two visually superimposed videotaped
ballgames by responding every time the ball was passed in the target game. An unexpected, yet highly visually conspicuous,
event, occurring about halfway through the l-rain game sequence, was noticed by only 18 of 85 subjects. Noticing was unrelated
to the delay between the event and the posttrial inquiry, and explicit “iconic” instructions to describe the last image seen
immediately after interruption proved ineffective in enhancing noticing rates, despite optimal visual conditions). Instead,
noticing appeared to be related to the specific anticipatory possibilities within the attended sequence itself. Content analysis
indicated that the latter part of the unexpected event sequence afforded greater anticipatory opportunities, and the findings
suggested that noticers who were skilled at the main task were more likely to detect the event during this part, whereas unskilled
noticers showed no such pattern. Results were consistent with and interpreted in terms of Neisser’s (1976) notion of the “perceptual
cycle.”
With each eye fixation, we experience a richly detailed visual world. Yet recent work on visual integration and change direction reveals that we are surprisingly unaware of the details of our environment from one view to the next: we often do not detect large changes to objects and scenes ('change blindness'). Furthermore, without attention, we may not even perceive objects ('inattentional blindness'). Taken together, these findings suggest that we perceive and remember only those objects and details that receive focused attention. In this paper, we briefly review and discuss evidence for these cognitive forms of 'blindness'. We then present a new study that builds on classic studies of divided visual attention to examine inattentional blindness for complex objects and events in dynamic scenes. Our results suggest that the likelihood of noticing an unexpected object depends on the similarity of that object to other objects in the display and on how difficult the priming monitoring task is. Interestingly, spatial proximity of the critical unattended object to attended locations does not appear to affect detection, suggesting that observers attend to objects and events, not spatial positions. We discuss the implications of these results for visual representations and awareness of our visual environment.
This research examined the effects of hands-free cell phone conversations on simulated driving. The authors found that these conversations impaired driver's reactions to vehicles braking in front of them. The authors assessed whether this impairment could be attributed to a withdrawal of attention from the visual scene, yielding a form of inattention blindness. Cell phone conversations impaired explicit recognition memory for roadside billboards. Eye-tracking data indicated that this was due to reduced attention to foveal information. This interpretation was bolstered by data showing that cell phone conversations impaired implicit perceptual memory for items presented at fixation. The data suggest that the impairment of driving performance produced by cell phone conversations is mediated, at least in part, by reduced attention to visual inputs.
The prevalence of automobile drivers talking on cell phones is growing, but the effect of that behavior on driving performance is unclear. Also unclear is the relationship between the difficulty level of a phone conversation and the resulting distraction.
This study used a driving simulator to determine the effect that easy and difficult cell phone conversations have on driving performance.
Cell phone use caused participants to have higher variation in accelerator pedal position, drive more slowly with more variation in speed, and report a higher level of workload regardless of conversation difficulty level.
Drivers may cope with the additional stress of phone conversations by enduring higher workloads or setting reduced performance goals.
Because an increasing number of people talk on the phone while driving, crashes caused by distracted drivers using cell phones will cause disruptions in business, as well as injury, disability, and permanent loss of personnel.
The rates of deaths and injuries among pedestrians have fallen in recent years, but still remain public health problems as about 5000 pedestrians die each year. Because pedestrians have been shown to be responsible or partially responsible for many of the crashes in which they are involved, we sought to assess the relationship of distracted walking and performing routine cautionary behaviors of pedestrians crossing a busy street in a southwestern city at an intersection, adjacent a university. The behavior of 866 individuals was recorded by trained observers as pedestrians walked across a 105-foot wide street served by a stop light and zebra painted crosswalk. We defined distracted pedestrians as those wearing headphones, talking on a cell phone, eating, drinking, smoking or talking as they crossed the street. Caution was measured by looking left and right, and entering the crosswalk only when the white proceed light was illuminated. We found that only 13.5% of walkers looked left and right and entered the crosswalk while the white light was flashing. Approximately 20% of walkers were distracted as they crossed the street. Regression analysis indicated that distraction was negatively, but weakly associated with displaying cautious pedestrian behaviors. Because traffic lights were routinely ignored and lack of caution was predicted by distraction, we suggest that inexpensive education efforts target pedestrians near college campuses.
The objective of this research was to determine the relative impairment associated with conversing on a cellular telephone while driving.
Epidemiological evidence suggests that the relative risk of being in a traffic accident while using a cell phone is similar to the hazard associated with driving with a blood alcohol level at the legal limit. The purpose of this research was to provide a direct comparison of the driving performance of a cell phone driver and a drunk driver in a controlled laboratory setting.
We used a high-fidelity driving simulator to compare the performance of cell phone drivers with drivers who were intoxicated from ethanol (i.e., blood alcohol concentration at 0.08% weight/volume).
When drivers were conversing on either a handheld or hands-free cell phone, their braking reactions were delayed and they were involved in more traffic accidents than when they were not conversing on a cell phone. By contrast, when drivers were intoxicated from ethanol they exhibited a more aggressive driving style, following closer to the vehicle immediately in front of them and applying more force while braking.
When driving conditions and time on task were controlled for, the impairments associated with using a cell phone while driving can be as profound as those associated with driving while drunk.
This research may help to provide guidance for regulation addressing driver distraction caused by cell phone conversations.
When attention is engaged in a task, unexpected events in the visual scene may go undetected, a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness (IB). At what stage of information processing must attention be engaged for IB to occur? Although manipulations that tax visuospatial attention can induce IB, the evidence is more equivocal for tasks that engage attention at late, central stages of information processing. Here, we tested whether IB can be specifically induced by central executive processes. An unexpected visual stimulus was presented during the retention interval of a working memory task that involved either simply maintaining verbal material or rearranging the material into alphabetical order. The unexpected stimulus was more likely to be missed during manipulation than during simple maintenance of the verbal information. Thus, the engagement of executive processes impairs the ability to detect unexpected, task-irrelevant stimuli, suggesting that IB can result from central, amodal stages of processing.
Arien Mack and Irvin Rock make the radical claim that there is no conscious perception of the visual world without attention to it.
Many people believe that merely by opening their eyes, they see everything in their field of view; in fact, a line of psychological research has been taken as evidence of the existence of so-called preattentional perception. In Inattentional Blindness, Arien Mack and Irvin Rock make the radical claim that there is no such thing—that there is no conscious perception of the visual world without attention to it.
The authors present a narrative chronicle of their research. Thus, the reader follows the trail that led to the final conclusions, learning why initial hypotheses and explanations were discarded or revised, and how new questions arose along the way. The phenomenon of inattentional blindness has theoretical importance for cognitive psychologists studying perception, attention, and consciousness, as well as for philosophers and neuroscientists interested in the problem of consciousness.
Bradford Books imprint
When are involved in a crash with a motor vehicle, their injuries are typically high if the vehicle is travelling at more than 40 km/h ( , 1981
Our research examined the effects of hands-free cell-phone conversations on simulated driving. We found that even when participants looked directly at objects in the driving environment, they were less likely to create a durable memory of those objects if they were conversing on a cell phone. This pattern was obtained for objects of both high and low relevance, suggesting that very little semantic analysis of the objects occurs outside the restricted focus of attention. Moreover, in-vehicle conversations do not interfere with driving as much as cell-phone conversations do, because drivers are better able to synchronize the processing demands of driving with in-vehicle conversations than with cell-phone conversations. Together, these data support an inattention-blindness interpretation wherein the disruptive effects of cell-phone conversations on driving are due in large part to the diversion of attention from driving to the phone conversation.
Driver inattention is thought to cause many automobile crashes. However, the research on attention is fragmented, and the applied research on driving and attention is further split between three largely independent traditions: the experimental research, the differential crash rate research, and the automation research. The goal of this review is to provide a conceptual framework to unify the research—a framework based on the combination of two fundamental dimen-sions of attentional selection: selection with and without conscious awareness (controlled and automatic), and selection by innate and acquired cognitive mechanisms (exogenous and endogenous). When applied to studies chosen to represent a broad range within the experimental literature, it reveals links between a variety of factors, including inexperience, inebriation, distracting stimuli, heads-up displays, fatigue, rumination, and secondary tasks such as phone conversations. This framework also has clear implications for the differential crash literature and the study of automated systems that support or replace functions of the driver. We conclude that driving research and policy could benefit from consideration of the different modes of attentional selection insofar as they integrate literatures, reveal directions for future research, and predict the effectiveness of interventions for crash-prevention.
We performed two experiments comparing the effects of speech production and speech comprehension on simulated driving performance. In both experiments, participants completed a speech task and a simulated driving task under single- and dual-task conditions, with language materials matched for linguistic complexity. In Experiment 1, concurrent production and comprehension resulted in more variable velocity compared to driving alone. Experiment 2 replicated these effects in a more difficult simulated driving environment, with participants showing larger and more variable headway times when speaking or listening while driving than when just driving. In both experiments, concurrent production yielded better control of lane position relative to single-task performance; concurrent comprehension had little impact on control of lane position. On all other measures, production and comprehension had very similar effects on driving. The results show, in line with previous work, that there are detrimental consequences for driving of concurrent language use. Our findings imply that these detrimental consequences may be roughly the same whether drivers are producing speech or comprehending it. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
This study examined the impact of cell phone conversation on situation awareness and performance of novice and experienced drivers. Driving performance and situation awareness among novice drivers ages 14–16 (n = 25) and experienced drivers ages 21–52 (n = 26) were assessed using a driving simulator. Performance was measured by the number of driving infractions committed: speeding, collisions, pedestrians struck, stop signs missed, and centerline and road edge crossings. Situation awareness was assessed through a query method and through participants’ performance on a direction-following task. Cognitive distractions were induced through simulated hands-free cell phone conversations. The results indicated that novice drivers committed more driving infractions and were less situationally aware than their experienced counterparts. However, the two groups suffered similar decrements in performance during the cell phone condition. This study provides evidence of the detrimental effects of cell phone use for both novice and experienced drivers. These findings have implications for supporting driving legislation that limits the use of cell phones (including hands-free) in motor vehicles, regardless of the driver’s experience level.
The study was concerned with the effects of mobile phone conversation on simulated driving in different traffic environments. Forty-eight participants drove a distance of 70 km on a route which led through different environments. The environments were: rural environment with a speed limit of 90 km/h, rural environment with a speed limit of 70 km/h, urban environment of low complexity, urban environment of medium complexity and urban environment of high complexity. The experimental design was mixed with phone mode (handsfree/handheld) as a between-subjects factor and phone use (yes/no) and traffic environment as within-subjects factors. Performance on a peripheral detection task (PDT) – a measure of mental workload – presented while driving, was impaired by mobile phone conversation in all environments. PDT performance was, however, remarkably poor at the complex urban environment, even when the participants were not using the phone. Driving speed was reduced by conversation in all environments for handheld mode, but only in two environments for handsfree mode – the rural environment with a speed limit of 90 km/h and the complex urban environment. The effects on speed could be interpreted as a compensatory effort for the increased mental workload.
Two subjects read short stories while writing lists of words at dictation. After some weeks of practice, they were able to write words, discover relations among dictated words, and categorize words for meaning, while reading for comprehension at normal speed. The performance of these subjects is not consistent with the notion that there are fixed limits to attentional capacity.RésuméOn a demandé à deux sujets de lire des petites histoires tout en écrivant sous dictée des listes de mots. Après quelques semaines de pratique les sujets ont pu écrire les mots dictés, découvrir des relations entre ces mots et les classer selon leur sens tant en lisant à une vitesse normale et en comprenant ce qu'ils lisaient. La performance de ces sujets est en désaccord avec l'idée que la capacité d'attention à des limites fixes.
Although we intuitively believe that salient or distinctive objects will capture our attention, surprisingly often they do not. For example, drivers may fail to notice another car when trying to turn or a person may fail to see a friend in a cinema when looking for an empty seat, even if the friend is waving. The study of attentional capture has focused primarily on measuring the effect of an irrelevant stimulus on task performance. In essence, these studies explore how well observers can ignore something they expect but know to be irrelevant. By contrast, the real-world examples above raise a different question: how likely are subjects to notice something salient and potentially relevant that they do not expect? Recently, several new paradigms exploring this question have found that, quite often, unexpected objects fail to capture attention, a phenomenon known as ‘inattentional blindness’. This review considers evidence for the effects of irrelevant features both on performance (‘implicit attentional capture’) and on awareness (‘explicit attentional capture’). Taken together, traditional studies of implicit attentional capture and recent studies of inattentional blindness provide a more complete understanding of the varieties of attentional capture, both in the laboratory and in the real world.
Why are hands-free mobile telephones linked to driver distraction and increased involvement in accidents? We suggest that during normal in-car conversation, both the driver and passenger will suppress conversation when the demands of the road become too great. However, a remote speaker on a mobile telephone has no access to the same visual input as the driver, and will be less likely to pace the conversation according to roadway demands. To test this hypothesis pairs of naïve participants drove a circuit of roads including dual carriageways, rural, urban and suburban roads in Nottinghamshire, UK. One of the participants in each pair was the driver, while the other was the conversational partner. Across three laps of the circuit the partner engaged in a verbal task with the driver while sat in the same car (with or without a blindfold), or via a hands-free mobile (cellular) telephone. The number of utterances, words, and questions were analysed for both drivers and passengers across the different types of road. The results demonstrated that the normal in-car conversations were suppressed during the most demanding urban roads. The mobile telephone condition prevented suppression from taking place in the passengers’ conversations, and even encouraged drivers to make more utterances that they would normally do with a normal in-car conversation. The results demonstrate a potential problem when using hands-free mobile telephones while driving.
We used a high-fidelity driving simulator to compare the performance of cell-phone drivers with drivers who were legally intoxicated from ethanol. When drivers were conversing on either a hand-held or hands-free cell-phone, their braking reactions were delayed and they were involved in more traffic accidents than when they were not conversing on the cell phone. By contrast, when drivers were legally intoxicated they exhibited a more aggressive driving style, following closer to the vehicle immediately in front of them and applying more force while braking. When controlling for driving conditions and time on task, cell-phone drivers exhibited greater impairment than intoxicated drivers. The results have implications for legislation addressing driver distraction caused by cell phone conversations.
The effect of the distance between the center of the focus of attention and an unexpected stimulus on detection was examined in two experiments with the use of the inattentional-blindness paradigm [Mack and Rock, 1998 Inattentional Blindness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)]. In experiment 1, the closer a stimulus was to the center of attention, the more likely it was to be detected. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and controlled for retinal eccentricity. These results suggest that low-level stimulus characteristics (e.g. location) may play an important role in the detection of unexpected stimuli. The data are consistent with previous research on the spatial aspects of attention demonstrating that the distance to the focus of attention is a critical variable. This study demonstrates that the effect of distance is similar under conditions of inattention. Theories put forward to explain inattentional blindness should include 'early' attentional factors, as well as factors resulting from later stages of processing.
Dual-task studies assessed the effects of cellular-phone conversations on performance of a simulated driving task. Performance was not disrupted by listening to radio broadcasts or listening to a book on tape. Nor was it disrupted by a continuous shadowing task using a handheld phone, ruling out, in this case, dual-task interpretations associated with holding the phone, listening, or speaking, However significant interference was observed in a word-generation variant of the shadowing task, and this deficit increased with the difficulty of driving. Moreover unconstrained conversations using either a handheld or a hands-free cell phone resulted in a twofold increase in the failure to detect simulated traffic signals and slower reactions to those signals that were detected. We suggest that cellular-phone use disrupts performance by diverting attention to an engaging cognitive context other than the one immediately associated with driving.
This study examines the effects of conversation mode and split-attention communication training on driving performance. The study is based on an experiment where drivers with and without communication training (pilots vs. nonpilots) completed a simulated driving course while involved in one of three conversation modes: no conversation, conversation with passenger, or conversation on a hands-free cellular telephone. Results indicate that cellular telephone conversations consume more attention and interfere more with driving than passenger conversations. Cell phone conversations lack the nonverbal cues available during close-contact conversations and conversation participants expend significant cognitive resources to compensate for the lack of such cues. The results also demonstrate that communication training may reduce the hazardous effects of cell phone conversations on driving performance.
Prior research has documented the manner in which a variety of driving performance measures are impacted by concurrent cell-phone use as well as the influence of age and gender of the driver. This current study examined the extent to which different driver groups are aware of their associated performance decrements. Subjects' confidence in dealing with distractors while driving and their ratings of task performance and demand were compared with their actual driving performance in the presence of a cell-phone task. While high confidence ratings appeared to be predictive of better driving performance for male drivers (as confidence increased, the size of the distraction effects decreased), this relationship did not hold for females; in fact, for older females, as confidence increased, performance decreased. Additionally, when drivers were matched in terms of confidence level, brake responses of older females were slowed to a much greater extent (0.38 s) than were brake responses of any other group (0.10s for younger males and females and 0.07 s for older males). Finally, females also rated the driving task as less demanding than males, even though their performance was more greatly affected by distraction. These results suggest that many drivers may not be aware of their decreased performance while using cell-phones and that it may be particularly important to target educational campaigns on driver distraction towards female drivers for whom there tended to be a greater discrepancy between driver perceptions and actual performance.
The current study examined the effects of cognitively distracting tasks on various measures of driving performance. Thirty-six college students with a median of 6 years of driving experience completed a driving history questionnaire and four simulated driving scenarios. The distraction tasks consisted of responding to a signal detection task and engaging in a simulated cell phone conversation. Driving performance was measured in terms of four categories of behavior: traffic violations (e.g., speeding, running stop signs), driving maintenance (e.g., standard deviation of lane position), attention lapses (e.g., stops at green lights, failure to visually scan for intersection traffic), and response time (e.g., time to step on brake in response to a pop-up event). Performance was significantly impacted in all four categories when drivers were concurrently talking on a hands-free phone. Performance on the signal detection task was poor and not significantly impacted by the phone task, suggesting that considerably less attention was paid to detecting these peripheral signals. However, the signal detection task did interact with the phone task on measures of average speed, speed variability, attention lapses, and reaction time. The findings lend further empirical support of the dangers of drivers being distracted by cell phone conversations.
Research amongst drivers suggests that pedestrians using mobile telephones may behave riskily while crossing the road, and casual observation suggests concerning levels of pedestrian mobile-use. An observational field survey of 270 females and 276 males was conducted to compare the safety of crossing behaviours for pedestrians using, versus not using, a mobile phone. Amongst females, pedestrians who crossed while talking on a mobile phone crossed more slowly, and were less likely to look at traffic before starting to cross, to wait for traffic to stop, or to look at traffic while crossing, compared to matched controls. For males, pedestrians who crossed while talking on a mobile phone crossed more slowly at unsignalized crossings. These effects suggest that talking on a mobile phone is associated with cognitive distraction that may undermine pedestrian safety. Messages explicitly suggesting techniques for avoiding mobile-use while road crossing may benefit pedestrian safety.
Concurrent mental workload degrades some aspects of driving performance, but drivers might be able to modify their behaviour adaptively to accommodate cognitive impairments. For example, they might maintain longer vehicle headway in dual-task conditions to compensate for slowed response times. Studies documenting such adaptive behaviours typically use steady-state driving scenarios such as car following. Yet, driving often involves tactical control situations in which drivers need to monitor multiple aspects of their traffic environment and to accommodate changing goals. In two simulator experiments, this study examined the impact of mental workload on safety margins (distances) that drivers keep when engaged in a tactical control task: passing other vehicles. Although drivers did increase their headway adaptively when engaged in steady-state car following (experiment 2), they did not adapt their behaviour to accommodate cognitive load when performing tactical control manoeuvres. Implications of this difference between steady-state and tactical control driving contexts, both for driving research and for driving safety, are discussed.
Driver distraction is a major cause of traffic accidents, with mobile telephones as a key source of distraction. In two studies, we examined distraction of pedestrians associated with mobile phone use. The first had 60 participants walk along a prescribed route, with half of them conversing on a mobile phone, and the other half holding the phone awaiting a potential call, which never came. Comparison of the performance of the groups in recalling objects planted along the route revealed that pedestrians conversing recalled fewer objects than did those not conversing. The second study had three observers record pedestrian behavior of mobile phone users, i-pod users, and pedestrians with neither one at three crosswalks. Mobile phone users crossed unsafely into oncoming traffic significantly more than did either of the other groups. For pedestrians as with drivers, cognitive distraction from mobile phone use reduces situation awareness, increases unsafe behavior, putting pedestrians at greater risk for accidents, and crime victimization.
DOI: 10.1002/acp 606 I Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events
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Copyright # 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 24: 597–607 (2010) DOI: 10.1002/acp 606 I. E. Hyman Jr et al. Simons, D. J., & Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception, 28, 1059–1074.
- Klauer