Can A Phone Get You Killed While Crossing A Busy Road?

Can A Phone Get You Killed While Crossing A Busy Road?. Young teens participating in an unusual interactive research were more prone to
endure a virtual accident if they talked on the telephone while
they crossed a busy road, study has shown. Preteens aren't the best street-crossers to start with, researchers said. But in the study, talking on the telephone increased the odds of being run over or almost run over by a virtual car from 8.5 to 12 %, a 43 % increase in risk.

The research was published in the February copy of the magazine
Pediatrics. The report comes on on the tails of several others that have shown proof that talking on the phone takes a toll on the concentration and visual processing skills of drivers, and may make the risk of an automobile accident
quadruple.

Crossing the busy road is very difficult, if you stop and think about it," said an associate professor of psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Young teens aren’t capable of doing it as good, he said, when talking on the phone.

Dr. Schwebel and his colleagues put 77 young teens in a virtual reality environment that mimicked an intersection, standing across the road from a school with
vehicles passing by in both directions. Researchers
asked the 10- and 11-year-olds to decide when it would be ok to cross. The preteens stepped off a platform almost the size of a curb when they thought it was ok.

Each child did a dozen simulated road crossings, half while speaking on the telephone. About half of the children were speaking during their first six crossings, while the other half answered calls during the second six crossings.

Although ability got better with time and practice, the psychologists found, the cell phone calls distracted the children, making them less attentive to traffic. While on the cell phone, they were more apt to hesitate before stepping off the simulated curb and left themselves too little time before another car drove by, leading to more close calls and more
collisions.

The computer environment did not imitate life in one
crucial instance: it didn't allow for children to speed up the pace and run
across the street, nor could a car slam on the brakes or swerve to avoid hitting the children, Dr. Schwebel said.

On the other hand, using a cell phone wasn’t new to any of the children, Dr. Schwebel noted. All of them had used the telephone before.

If you’re a parent, you should probably tell your kids not to be texting or conversing on the telephone, or listening to an iPod for that matter, when walking across a roadway, said David Strayer, professor of psychology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and an expert on telephone safety.

This is relative to what we know about how the mind works when people are driving, Dr. Strayer added. You do need your mind to navigate through the world, whether you’re snowboarding or skiing or walking.. Article Source: http://arsharing.com

Article title: Can A Phone Get You Killed While Crossing A Busy Road? By: Jason Kembell

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