March 10, 2008
Driving study deals blow to hands-free phones
Simply listening to a cellphone distracts drivers, a study concludes. The finding raises questions about the effectiveness of laws that ban only the use of handheld devices while driving. USA Today reports.
"Neuroscientist Marcel Just, director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh studied 29 volunteers who used a driving simulator while inside an MRI brain scanner. The volunteers steered a car along a virtual winding road undisturbed or while deciding whether a sentence they heard was true or false.
Listening while driving led to a "significant deterioration in driving accuracy," Just and his co-authors write in the latest issue of the journal Brain Research. The drivers hit the guardrail and veered out of the center of the lane more often while listening.
"Certain activities in life are inherently multitasking, but driving and cellphone use isn't something Mother Nature thought about when she was designing our brains," Just says.
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2008/03/019357.htm
