Driving Under the Influence...of Our Cellphone?

Being a Psychology major i learn about many different studies that people may not normally here about, or hear the full story. Recently in my Cognitive Psychology we went over a few studies dealing with Attention. These studies find that it is very hard for us to multi task with something auditory and visual, such as driving and talking on the phone. Very shocking to me was what they found from accidents, and studying attention of those who drive while talking on the cell phone. The results? Driving and talking on the cell phone is equivalent to drinking and driving when it comes to how much attention we can focus on driving. Now i know many of us would never dare drive under the influence, let alone with our children in the car, but yet, we all have talked on the cell phone while driving. Not to say that we will get in a wreck necessarily if we do drive on the phone, or drink and drive(please don't) but the stats show the likely hood is the same for both. And headsets for phones or speaker phones? No better, because our attention is still directed toward what we are hearing. Pretty Scary. Just a little information to think about when talking on the phone next time in traffic!