Cell-Phones, Distracted Driving, Bans, and Fatalities

Introduction

Despite its impressive processing power and remarkable flexibility, the human brain is known to have severe bottlenecks of information processing that limit our ability to consciously perceive, hold in mind, and act upon immediate visual information (Duncan, 1980; Marois & Ivanoff, 2005). Neuroimaging studies have shown that when two conflicting streams of information must be processed simultaneously, they dispute for processing capacity, leading to what is known as the “dual-task interference” (Klinberg & Roland, 1997; Watanabe & Funahashi, 2014). As a result, the performance of each concurrent attention task tends to decrease, compared to when each task is performed alone.

Since such conclusions have countless implications on almost all of our everyday paradigms, this results have been shifting the attention of many applied sciences to dual-task related problems; mainly with the purpose of enlightening policy debates and keeping safety protocols up to prominent social changes. Among those changes resides the striking proliferation of the use of mobile phones. To put things into perspective, the average use per subscriber has risen from 140 to 740 minutes a month since 1993 (Bhargava & Pathania, 2013). In the United States alone, the number of mobile phone subscribers increased in more than 94,541% in the last three decades (CTIA – The Wireless Association, 2011), completely changing the way people deal with information and manage attention.

We see not only tremendous growth in cell phone subscribers but also an increase in usage of these devices over time by drivers (Loeb et al., 2009). Still in 2004, it was estimated that about 85% of those use one while driving (Clayton, Helms & Simpson, 2006). The abrupt modification it brought to our everyday life made applied researchers engage in determining whether cell-phone conversations could undermine people's safety during activities that require continuous periods of attention, as is driving. In this article we provide an overview of the current scientific knowledge regarding the interaction between cell-phones, distracted driving, bans and fatalities.

To all appearances, Brown, Tickner and Simmonds, from the Medical Research Council, a publicly funded government agency in the United Kingdom, were the first researchers to publish a recognized article in this area (Brown, Tickner & Simmonds, 1969). At the other end of the spectrum, with the relatively recent advent of driving simulators, David Strayer (Strayer & Johnston, 2001; Strayer et al., 2003), at the University of Utah, is undoubtedly the most renowned author in this field nowadays.