Us Research, Inattention Blindness with cell Phones in Cars

A new study indicates hands-free cell phones used in cars are just as potentially dangerous to the driver's health as the hand-held kind. The University of Utah researchers who conducted the survey say motorists are more accident-prone and slower to react when they talk on cellular telephones -- including the hands-free models -- because "inattention blindness" makes the driver less able to process visual information.

"Even when participants are directing their gaze at objects in the driving environment, they may fail to 'see' them because attention is directed elsewhere," say study authors psychologists David Strayer, Frank Drews and William Johnston. "Phone conversations impair driving performance by withdrawing attention from the visual scene, yielding a form of inattention blindness." The study concludes that inattention blindness explains the researchers' widely publicized 2001 findings that users of hands-free and hand-held cell phones are equally impaired, missing more traffic signals and reacting to signals more slowly than motorists who do not use cell phones.