Texting and Driving; Stay Alive Don’t Text And Drive

Using your phone and driving, it seems like a no brainer, right? You’ve witnessed your parents, friends and other people do it multiple times, so what’s the harm in you doing it too? We’ve all have been in that situation where you really want to skip the current song, you received a text from your friend asking where you are, or mom is calling to badger you. We’ve all been there. But how many of us have stopped ourselves from completing this task, from touching our phones? How many of us have decided: it can wait? Not many.

Studies in 2016 showed: “Thirteen percent of all the distracted drivers using cell phones were 15 to 19 years old (58 of the 457 cell-phone distracted drivers in fatal crashes).”

One can go on and on about statistics and studies, but a more important case to bring would be the scientific study of cognition. Cognition or “mental activity” is defined as a term that refers to the acquisition, storage, transformation, and use of knowledge.

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If you rather have a simpler version and “google it” it is defined as: A result of this; a perception, sensation, notion, or intuition. When driving a vehicle, you need to have cognition. Everyone uses top-down and bottom-up processing when driving but the one we should really concentrate on is on top-down approach. Top-down processing emphasizes how a person’s concepts, expectations, and memory can influence object recognition. Meaning, when we are driving, we expect everyone around us to now the rules of the road, because they have a driver’s license.

It’s our expectation as soon as we get behind the wheel and it’s a concept everyone is aware of. The same way we expect everyone to know when to change lanes, the speeding limit and to have both hands on the wheel while driving. All of this is mental activity one must have in order to get behind the wheel.

Now that we understand the process behind cognition and how we mentally approach the concept of driving, let’s put it into practice. Let’s look at the visual processing component called inattentional blindness. It is when you are paying attention to one specific event or object – that you fail to notice when something unexpected but completely visible object appears. For example, you are driving in the middle lane going 50mph. All the sudden your phone starts vibrating, so you look down to see who called/texted you. In those 10 seconds that you looked down to check your phone, the vehicle that was next to you who had its blinkers on to merge onto your lane, merges. While you look at your phone, you dismiss the vehicle changing lanes right in front of you and you were unable to push the brakes and you end up crashing into the vehicle in front of you. We learned that when we perceive an entire scene, our top-down processing basically encourages us to assume that the scene will remain stable. Therefore, you felt comfortable picking up the phone, not realizing that you already had an irrational assumption, overusing the top-down processing component.

Cognitive distraction is categorized as a major cause of accidents in the US. For instance, when one is driving and then checks their phone to respond to a call or text, they become distracted mentally. In some situations, this situation makes one fail to multitask on the road and at the phone. When one is distracted, they get blind to their surroundings, especially the immediate environment. Inattentional blindness reduces the brain activity especially ones that are mainly active during driving. Although cellphones cause this distraction, they are not mainly the reasons for concern. According to cognitive psychologists, human attention has limited capacity and at some point, one can fail to multitask. A study carried out to establish the effects of the inattentional blindness and human cognition portray that some actions such as braking, decelerating, and responding to traffic lights were significantly slower than when one is fully engaged with the road. Engaging in a conversation deters one from being in a stable environment where one can easily process information about their driving environment.

Drivers are responsible for their lives, that of their passengers, as well as of the pedestrians. Therefore, when a driver is distracted, they pose a threat to all in the environment. Naturally, cognitive psychologists advice for one to avoid any form of distraction, and if the situation is unavoidable, they should park and only drive when in a stable state to do so. Psychologists argue that although there is advanced technology aimed at ensuring the drivers get a better driving experience, there is also the risk of them not noticing hazards. The cognitive response is at times selective on certain factors. Thus, there is a distinction between visuospatial and central attention. Visuospatial attention is one that mainly involves direct attention to space and the central attention is mainly on the awareness of the particular environment.

Texting and driving as you may know by now disrupts these proceedings from becoming successful. For an example, when you are driving you are using manual attention to help direct the wheel of the car. Then you have your visual attention which helps seek your surroundings and then lastly, your cognitive thoughts which help you comprehend what is going on. On the other hand, when texting is involved in this scenario, it can alter very quickly. Your manual attention will be focused on grabbing and pressing buttons on the phone, your visual attention will be on the screen of the phone and your cognitive thoughts will be focused on the phone instead of driving. Another tricky state that can occur a lot of the times is calling and having conversations with people on a Bluetooth piece or car speakers. Now, you may be wondering what the difference is between speaking to a person in the car with you than someone who is not? There are many individuals that tend to do this “method” although not many know the consequences that go with it. The main difference is that the person who is inside the vehicle with you are aware of what’s going on and that you need as much focus as possible. Whereas, a person who is not physically there cannot really map out what you are doing. This can cause more distraction to the river and become just as dangerous. It is only through hindsight that we realize that getting distracted is a serious matter. In other words, distraction might not be realized right then and there until a mistake has occurred.

As you can see, when it comes to analyzing a condition such as texting and driving your cognitive attention along with other types of attention need to work together to really focus on driving which in this case is considered as your main task. It happens to many of us and everyone is impacted by cognitive distractions even if we do not intentionally mean to do so. It is difficult to put our 100% attention on more than one task at the same time. Don’t get misled as to how much things you think your brain can juggle all at once because it is very challenging for our brains to do just that. Several studies have proven that many individuals try to multitask and at times it harms them rather than benefit them.

1. W. Matlin, Margaret and Thomas A. Farmer “Cognition.” studyblue.com. Wiley, 1 Oct. 2015. Web. 22 Apr. 2019.