For the week of February 5 - 11, 2003

Paying attention to inattention blindness

Commentary by DICK DORWORTH

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"Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car."

—E.B. White

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"The man who sees little always sees less than there is to see; the man who hears badly always hears something more than there is to hear."

 — Nietzche

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We’ve all seen them. We’ve all been alarmed, amused, angered, amazed and alerted by them. Some of us have been hit by them. Some of us, alas, have been killed by them. All of us watch out for them; and, truth be told, all too many of us have been them. On a personal level, the only thing any of us can really do about them is to not be one of them. By "them" I refer, of course, to cell phone drivers, those inattentive, irresponsible, annoying, half-aware ding-bats whose attention to the road, the automobiles and pedestrians around them is on par (and, in many cases, sub-par) with that of the drunken driver. I mean, the cell phone driver, with one hand on the wheel, one hand on the cell phone, one mind on the details of guiding a ton of moving metal and glass through a world of flesh and blood, another mind on the details of the conversation often with a person, literally, thousands of miles away, is a threat to man, beast, property and the well being of the community at-large, in this case that of the Wood River Valley.

It is admittedly only one man’s perception, but within the Wood River Valley and its towns of Sun Valley, Ketchum, Hailey and Bellevue, it has been my repeated observation that a preponderance of inattentive driving that upon closer inspection reveals a cell phone glued to the ear of the driver takes place within the SUV community. The larger social/psychological/cultural/demographic implications of this phenomenon are interesting and, needless to say, controversial to discuss, debate and contemplate, but the exact correlation between the cell phone and irresponsible SUV drivers is as hard to know for sure as the next move of a driver with one hand on the wheel, one hand on the phone, one mind on the steering wheel and the other in some unknowable, dark place that is not the road at hand.

What is not hard to know is that a driver talking on a cell phone is an inattentive driver. A driver operating a vehicle while talking on a cell phone is suffering from a malady with the descriptive name of "inattention blindness." This describes a state of mind that has been studied and written up and which has consequences. A 1997 study appearing in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine concluded that talking on a cell phone while driving an automobile quadrupled the risk of an accident. Quadrupled. This study has been verified by several other studies. Talking on a cell phone quadruples the risk of having an accident.

Think of that. Talking on a cell phone quadruples the risk of having an accident.

And using a "hands-free" cell phone device does not make driving while talking on a cell phone any safer. David Strayer, an associate professor of Psychology at the University of Utah, has recently concluded a study that indicates the truth of the obvious: talking on a cell phone while driving is dangerous. Writing in the March Journal of Experimental Psychology, Strayer’s group said that use of a cell phone clearly distracted drivers. "People, when on a cell phone compared to when they weren’t, overall their reactions were slower," Strayer said. "They got into more rear-end collisions. They just kind of had a sluggish style that was unresponsive to unpredictable events like a car breaking down in front of them, a light changing or things like that."

There was no difference, he said, between a hand-held and hand-free phone. "You were impaired in both cases," he said. Even more disturbing to Strayer was that most volunteers for the study did not realize they were driving poorly. Volunteers, he reported, "…usually felt they performed without impairment, and, in some cases, thought they drove better when on the cell phones." Interestingly, the study found that drivers listening to music or audio books or talking to a passenger were not affected by inattention to the road.

Strayer’s team set up a second study using an eye tracker, a precise instrument to determine exactly where someone is looking. They found that while drivers looked at objects, if they had been talking on a cell phone at the time they could not remember seeing them.

"There is a kind of tunnel vision," he said. "You aren’t processing the peripheral information as well. Even though your eyes are looking right at something, when you are on the cell phone, you are not as likely to see it." This includes road signs, other vehicles and traffic lights. "This is a variant of something called inattention blindness," he said.

Inattention blindness is a great term. It has larger connotations than driving around the streets and roads of the Wood River Valley; but whether we’re in the vicinity of a driver at the wheel of an SUV taking the kids to school or in a country where the head of the ship of state is taking the country to war, paying attention to inattention blindness is something we all need to do for our own well being.

 

The Idaho Mountain Express is distributed free to residents and guests throughout the Sun Valley, Idaho resort area community. Subscribers to the Idaho Mountain Express will read these stories and others in this week's issue.