Arthur F. Kramer

Mark B. Neider

Initial Study Finds Cell Phones Distracting, Validates Experimental Set-up

Leave it to a couple of New Yorkers to inform the world about the dangers of trying to cross a busy street while talking on a cell phone. Beckman Institute researchers Art Kramer and Mark Neider, both native New Yorkers, and their collaborators have just published the first paper in a research line that is investigating pedestrian distraction in a completely original way.

Neider is a postdoctoral research associate at Beckman and lead author of the paper, which reports on dual task performance involving talking on a cell phone or listening to music on an iPod while test subjects try to cross a virtual reality street. The researchers said it is the first study of its kind to use an experimental approach to investigate pedestrian distraction and the first to employ virtual reality (VR) technology to study the topic.

The paper reports that talking on a cell was in fact a distraction while trying to cross the street but that listening to an iPod was not. So, what should people take away from this first paper on the subject?

“They should be aware that their ability to do certain tasks can be impaired when they are using these types of devices,” Neider said. “I’m not going to sit here and tell people not to talk on their cell phones. But be aware and act accordingly. If you are talking on a cell phone and about to cross a street, maybe tell somebody to hold on for a second.”

Neider said this initial paper has laid the groundwork to expand research on the topic of pedestrian distraction and related cognitive issues.

“I think this is a good start,” Neider said. “We have taken the dual task paradigm, which is a classic paradigm, and moved it along here to an ecologically valid environment. Getting at the underlying theoretical mechanisms that are in play, what’s impaired and where that impairment stems from, are open questions and ones that we are looking at now.”

The research line has its origins in a meeting between Kramer, Neider, and fellow Beckman researcher Jason McCarley. McCarley is a co-author of the paper, as are Hank Kaczmarski and James Crowell of Beckman’s Illinois Simulator Laboratory (ISL). Kaczmarski and Crowell created the experiment’s virtual reality environment using the ISL’s CAVE immersive VR technology and a modified treadmill (to read more about the project, click here).

This first study was done with college students, who were grouped into three categories for performing the street crossing task: no distraction, listening to music on an iPod, and talking on a cell phone. While the results showed that talking on a cell phone is a distraction while crossing a street, one result that surprised the investigators was that talking on a cell phone did not cause pedestrian-vehicle collisions.

Both Kramer and Neider caution that that finding probably has to do with the experiment’s parameters. There was no motivation in this initial study for test subjects to cross the intersection quickly.

“Whereas in the real world, people are often in a rush,” Neider said. “They run around like ants marching in New York. Everybody has to get somewhere and they have to be there five minutes ago. It’s possible that when you are under this sort of pressure you are more likely to take higher risks in that situation and when you talking on a cell phone you may have problems.”  

“We left it open-ended; we left a lot of time for people to cross the street. In retrospect maybe we shouldn’t have done that,” Kramer said. “When we do future experiments, one thing we’ll do is give people incentives to cross quickly – just as they have incentives now: they don’t want to miss a class, they have to get to a business meeting, or they have to go to a job interview.”

Despite the fact this experiment didn’t cause distracted students to have collisions with virtual automobiles, Kramer said that result shouldn’t be misconstrued by the general public.