Can Listening To Your Ipod Get You Killed While Crossing A Busy Road?

By: Jason Kembell

Children younger than 13 years participating in a very different interactive simulation were more apt to
encounter a virtual accident if they talked on the cell phone while
they crossed a busy road, studies have shown. Young teens are far from the best road-crossers to begin with, the study conductors said. But in the study, speaking on the cell phone increased the odds of being hit or almost run over by a computer car from 8.5 to 12 %, a 43 percent jump in risk.

The report was published in the February issue of the journal
Pediatrics. The report comes on the heels of several others that have stated that talking on the phone takes a toll on the attention and visual processing skills of drivers, and may cause the possibility of a vehicular accident
four-fold.

Crossing the road is very difficult, if you stop and think about it," said an associate professor of psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Children younger than 13 years aren’t able to do it nearly as well, he said, when talking on the phone.

Dr. Schwebel and his colleagues placed 77 preteens in a virtual reality environment that impersonated 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 decide when it would be best to cross. The children stepped off a platform roughly the height of a sidewalk when they thought it was fine.

Each child did twelve simulated roadway crossings, half while speaking on the cell phone. About half of the children were talking during their first six crossings, while the other half answered calls during the second six crossings.

Even though performance improved with time and practice, the psychologists found, the telephone conversations distracted the children, making them pay less attention to traffic. While on the telephone, they more often hesitated before leaving the simulated sidewalk and left themselves too little time before another car drove by, leading to more close calls and more
collisions.

The virtual environment did not copy life in one
important way: it did not allow for children to speed up the pace and run
across the busy road, nor could a car slam on the brakes or swerve to avoid an accident, Dr. Schwebel said.

On the other hand, using a 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 mp3 player for that matter, when walking across a road, said David Strayer, professor of psychology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and an expert on phone 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 biking or skiing or rollerblading.

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