Pedestrians, vehicles, and cell phones.
With cellular phones and portable music players becoming a staple in everyday life, questions have arisen regarding the attentional deficits that might occur when such devices are used while performing other tasks. Here, we used a street-crossing task in an immersive virtual environment to test how this sort of divided attention affects pedestrian behavior when crossing a busy street. Thirty-six participants navigated through a series of unsigned intersections by walking on a manual treadmill in a virtual environment. While crossing, participants were undistracted, engaged in a hands free cell phone conversation, or listening to music on an iPod. Pedestrians were less likely to successfully cross the road when conversing on a cell phone than when listening to music, even though they took more time to initiate their crossing when conversing on a cell phone ( approximately 1.5s). This success rate difference was driven largely by failures to cross the road in the allotted trial time period (30s), suggesting that when conversing on a cell phone pedestrians are less likely to recognize and act on crossing opportunities.
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 405 N. Mathews Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. mneider@illinois.edu
Mark B
MB
Neider
Jason S
JS
McCarley
James A
JA
Crowell
Henry
H
Kaczmarski
Arthur F
AF
Kramer
D000063:Accidents, Traffic; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D040421:Cell Phone; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D018986:Motor Vehicles; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D011930:Reaction Time; D014584:User-Computer Interface; D016138:Walking / Q000523:psychology*; D055815:Young Adult