Whether it's hitting a jump shot in basketball or driving a car, it's no secret that the more you practice, the less attention you have to pay to every detail of your performance. Of course, these activities still require a certain amount of cognitive resources to be completed successfully. Take driving as an example. Although, after years behind the wheel, it may seem like you don't need to focus much on the road, there is ample evidence suggesting that when a driver is engaged in a cell phone conversation, accidents are more likely to happen.
The idea is simple, we are limited capacity systems - meaning that we can only attend to so many things at once. When our attention is devoted to someone on the other end of a cell phone conversation, we have less resources available to react to unexpected occurrences on the road. Now, new research suggests, that it's not just when drivers are on the phone themselves that accidents occur. As it happens, a passenger on a cell phone increases the likelihood of a driver making mistakes as well.
In a paper published this week in Psychological Science, psychologists Lauren Emberson, Gary Lupyan, Michael Goldstein, and Michael Spivey asked people to perform two difficult tasks designed to mimic the attentional demands of driving. In one task, people used a mouse to track a moving dot across a computer screen. The goal was to keep the mouse as close to the dot as possible. This task requires the type of vigilance that you need to stay within a traffic lane. In a second task, people were instructed to respond to particular target letters presented on a computer screen while ignoring other letters that appeared. To be successful at this task, you have to continually reorient your attention to the letters in front of you, similar to what is required when responding to changing traffic signals. While people performed these tasks, they overheard three different types of speech: a dialogue consisting of both sides of a cell-phone conversation (recordings of Cornell undergraduate roommates having spontaneous cell-phone conversations were used), one half of the cell-phone conversation, or one person's recap of the cell phone conversation.
What the researchers found was that overhearing half a cell-phone conversation distracted people, causing them to perform more poorly on the driving-like tasks than when they performed the tasks in silence. Interestingly, this poor performance was not seen when people overheard both sides of a conversation or simply one person's recap of a conversation. This means that it's not overhearing speech in general that leads to distraction, but overhearing one half of a conversation that does the damage.
Overhearing a cell phone conversation means you only hear half of the dialogue, making the content of the conversation less predictable and thus more prone to capture your attention - attention that is then unavailable for unexpected occurrences behind the wheel. We have known for some time that engaging in a cell phone conversation (whether you are holding the phone or are using a hands-free devise) can impair your driving. Now it seems that even when your passenger is the one on the phone, safety on the road goes down as well.
For more information on the many factors that distract us from performing at our best - on the road, in the boardroom, and on the playing field, check out my forthcoming book: Choke
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Emberson, L., Lupyan, G., Goldstein, M., & Spivey, M. (2010). Overheard Cell-Phone Conversations: When Less Speech Is More Distracting. Psychological Science.
