Well I guess it's no surprise that using the cell phone while driving impairs your driving ability, hence the laws prohibiting their use while driving in some states.
But this study found something beyond that: it's not the cell phone itself that impairs your driving,
it's any conversation you're having while at the wheel!
I haven't read the details, but from this article it appears that it doesn't matter whether you're on the phone or not. All that matters is that you're having a conversation:
Quote:
And it doesn't matter whether the phone is hand-held or handsfree. Any activity requiring a driver to "actively be part of a conversation" likely will impair driving abilities, Strayer said.
In fact, motorists who talk on cell phones are more impaired than drunk drivers with blood-alcohol levels exceeding .08, Strayer and colleague Frank Drews, an assistant professor of psychology, found during research conducted in 2003.
Their new study appears in this winter's issue of Human Factors, the quarterly journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.
Strayer said they found that when 18-to-25-year-olds were placed in a driving simulator and talked on a cellular phone, they reacted to brake lights from a car in front of them as slowly as 65- to 74-year-olds who were not using a cell phone.
Elderly drivers became even slower to react to brake lights when they spoke on a cell phone.
In the simulator, each participant drove four 10-mile freeway trips lasting about 10 minutes each, talking on a cell phone with a research assistant during half the trip and driving without talking the other half. Only handsfree phones were used.
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Sometimes when a person is in front of you and driving erratically, you think, Oh great, a drunk driver. Then you pass them and you see it's two people in the front having an animated conversation, or maybe an argument.
Or there are kids in the backseats, probably wreaking havoc.
So if having a conversation impairs your ability to the level of being legally intoxicated, should it be treated the same as drunk driving?
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...king_motorists