Can Talking On Your Cellphone Get You Run Over While Crossing A Roadway?

Preteens participating in a very different interactive simulation were more prone to
have a virtual accident if they talked on the telephone while
they walked across a road, study has shown. Young teens aren't the best street-crossers to begin with, the study conductors said. But in the research, speaking on the cell phone increased the odds of being run over or almost hit by a computer vehicle from 8.5 to 12 %, a 43 percent increase in risk.

The research was published in the (Feb) issue of the magazine
Pediatrics. The report comes on after several others that have shown that talking on the telephone takes a toll on the attention and visual processing skills of drivers, and may make the risk of an automobile accident
four-fold.

Crossing the busy street is very difficult, if you stop and ponder it," said an associate professor of psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Children younger than 13 years arent capable of doing it as well, he said, when talking on the phone.

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

Each child did a dozen virtual roadway crossings, half while conversing on the cell phone. About half of the children were conversing during their first six crossings, while the other half received calls during the second six crossings.

Although ability got better with time and practice, the psychologists noticed, the cell phone conversations distracted the children, making them pay less attention to traffic. While on the cell phone, they were more apt to hesitate before leaving the simulated curb and didn't give themselves enough time before another vehicle drove by, causing more close calls and more
collisions.

The virtual environment did not imitate life in one
important instance: it did not allow for children to pick up the pace and run
across the road, nor could a car slow down or swerve to avoid an accident, Dr. Schwebel said.

On the other hand, using a phone wasnt new to any of the children, Dr. Schwebel noted. All of them had used the phone before.

If youre a parent, you should probably tell your kids not to be texting or having a conversation on the cell phone, or listening to an iPod for that matter, when crossing a street, said David Strayer, professor of psychology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and an expert on cell phone safety.

This is the same as 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 youre snowboarding or skiing or walking.