FIVE THINGS YOU CAN’T DO WHEN PHONING

Road Safety

If you are one of my regular readers on this column, you would have realised that I have spent the last three weeks focusing on the increasing risk behavior of driving and phoning behind the wheels. This is in spite of the provisions of the National Road Traffic Regulations which prohibits this risk behavior. I equally took you through memory lane on the numerous strategic interventions introduced by the Federal Road Safety Corps to address and checkmate this behavior which to me is suicidal.

Last week, I spiced this focus by raising my voice on those who feel that the time to turn up the dial of enforcement against distracted driving through the deployment of appropriate technology which developed climes like the United Kingdom are experimenting through a pilot study which has revealed tremendous impact in its capacity to track and arrest defaulters. Today, I wish to draw the curtain on this by sharing a material by Gemma- Briggs and Graham Hole which I sourced online. I believe you will find it quite revealing.

Before their writing rolls, I do hope you still remember the data I shared with you on the level of infraction in the United Kingdom which revealed that 26percent of 1,700 motorists reported using a handheld mobile phone while driving, despite it being illegal.  This phone “addiction” which has grave consequences is not a while or Blackman’s disease neither is it a developed or developing clime problem alone. A similar survey had been done in our clime although I couldn’t lay my hands on it but I recall that the findings equally raises cause for concern.

Let me now allow you enjoy their submissions. ‘’A quick online search throws   up many articles suggesting that people are “glued” to their smartphones and therefore miss important and enriching experiences and interactions going on around them.

But psychological research shows that not only do people miss things because they are staring at their phone’s screen, they also miss things when they’re looking ahead but talking on their phone. In fact, people conversing on a phone can appear to look at something yet fail to consciously detect it.

This “inattention blindness” has been demonstrated in various ways, including the famous “invisible gorilla” experiment. By focusing on one particular task (such as counting how often a basketball is passed between team members) we can miss other, highly salient events in the scene – such as a person dressed as a gorilla.

The ability to focus our attention like this is extremely useful, as we simply couldn’t process all of the incoming visual information that we are constantly bombarded with. But in some situations, inattention blindness can have serious consequences.

Here’s research on five things you can’t do properly while on your phone:

Notice hazards when driving-Drivers using a hands-free phone are far less likely to notice and react to hazards, even those directly ahead of them. This leads to increased stopping distances and a four-fold increase in accident risk. Research suggests this inattention blindness is produced by the need to share limited mental resources between tasks.

Phone conversations have a visual component – you picture where your conversation partner is and what they are saying – and this mental imagery draws on resources which are needed for accurate visual perception. Consequently, someone on the phone can look at, but not see, a hazard.

Cross the road safely-Pedestrians talking on the phone are more likely to be injured crossing the road. They tend to take longer to decide to cross, and then walk more slowly. They also make more unsafe judgements on crossings.

In one study, phone-users successfully crossed a simulated street only 84% of the time. Compared with other distractions, including listening to music, phone use is associated with poorer decision-making, missed opportunities to cross and increased likelihood of being involved in a collision.

Take the most direct route-Phone-users may change the way they walk, which in turn affects the route they take and what they notice around them. One observational study found that people talking on the phone were more likely to change the direction they were walking in, were less likely to be aware of other people around them, resulting in them getting in other people’s way, and tended to walk more slowly than people who were either listening to music or undistracted.

Even a highly practised and “automatic” task like walking can become disrupted when a person’s attention is diverted to a phone conversation. Another study looked at participants’ gait while walking to a previously learned destination. Compared to undistracted walkers, phone users walked slower and made more lateral deviations from the set route, meaning they walked further than needed.

Notice advertisements you pass-Phone-users are less likely to recall seeing advertisements that they have passed while on the phone. Research has shown that even though people distracted by a phone conversation look at advertisements as often as those who are undistracted, they don’t remember them when later questioned.

One study neatly demonstrated the power of inattention blindness in phone users by observing people distracted either by a phone call, a conversation with another person, or listening to music.

Walking across a large square on a college campus, participants passed an unexpected and highly visible item – a clown on a unicycle. While those talking to another person or listening to music mostly noticed the clown, only 25% of people on the phone reported having seen him. Unsurprisingly, these phone users were quite shocked to have missed something so obviously attention grabbing.

So, it appears from the available research that people talking on their phones have diminished “situation awareness” – they are less conscious of what is happening around them, which can have important implications for their own and others’ safety. Phone users are more likely to miss important and highly visible events – and crucially are often unaware of how unaware they may be.