Experiments Suggest Toll of Distracted Driving Is Higher

Research into distracted driving has found reason to think it's more of a problem than data and past studies have shown. And distracted driving already is linked to numerous fatal accidents—more than 3,500 of them in the US in 2021. The research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied suggests that there's a bit of a mental hangover after a driver has concentrated on something other than driving, then turned back to the road. It's a factor not considered in other studies, Scientific American reports, which means the number of accidents attributable to distracted driving could be significantly higher than previous estimates.

A team of cognitive psychologists monitored subjects perform a driving-related task while carrying out a distracting one—in a lab, not on the road. The participants were unable to again give their full attention to driving for at least 30 seconds after the distraction ended—they were still distracted from trying to multitask. The lingering effect is what has not been considered before. David Strayer of the University of Utah, leader of the team, suggests the reason is that information related to the distraction isn't cleared from a person's working memory instantly. It can stay there for a while, jamming up the works and affecting the next task. That could be the reason that stopping the work a person is doing to read a newly arrived email can cause a brief fog when resuming the original task.

There's already evidence that—as with other areas of life—humans aren't as good at multitasking as they think they are. And distractions aren't limited to cellphones; eating, setting a GPS unit, and other activities that take eyes off the road count. New laws might be required to address the problem, and some places are cracking down. Police in Ohio now can pull an adult driver over just for using a phone or other device, per the Columbus Dispatch, though officers say it can be hard to spot phone use. North Carolina's Highway Patrol has started using special cameras to photograph commercial vehicle drivers through the windshield, per WNCN. Artificial intelligence is used to interpret the image as a driver using a phone, and police are notified. (More distracted driving stories.)