Text messaging among pedestrians leads to increased cognitive distraction and reduced situation awareness, and may lead to increases in unsafe behavior leading to injury and death.[77][78] Recent studies conducted on cell phone use while walking showed that cell phone users recall fewer objects when conversing,[79] walk slower,[77][80] have altered gait[78][81] and are more unsafe when crossing a street.[79] Additionally, some gait analyses showed that stance phase during overstepping motion, longitudinal and lateral deviation increased during cell phone operation but step length and clearance did not;[77][81] a different analysis did find increased step clearance and reduced step length.[78]
It is unclear which processes may be impacted by distraction, which types of distraction may impact which cognitive processes, and how individual differences may impact the influence of distraction.[82] Lamberg and Muratori believe that engaging in a dual-task, such as texting while walking, may interfere with working memory and result in walking errors.[77] Their study demonstrated that participants engaged in text messaging were unable to maintain walking speed or retain accurate spatial information, suggesting an inability to adequately divide their attention between two tasks. According to them, the addition of texting while walking with vision occluded increases the demands placed on the working memory system resulting in gait disruptions.[77]
Texting on a phone distracts participants, even when the texting task used is a relatively simple one.[80] Stavrinos et al. investigated the impact of other cognitive tasks, such as engaging in conversations or cognitive tasks on a phone, and found that participants actually have reduced visual awareness.[83] This finding was supported by Licence et al., who conducted a similar study.[78] For example, texting pedestrians may fail to notice unusual events in their environment, such as a unicycling clown.[84] These findings suggest that tasks that require the allocation of cognitive resources can have an impact on visual attention even when the task itself does not require the participants to avert their eyes from their environment. The act of texting itself seems to impair pedestrians' visual awareness. It appears that the distraction produced by texting is a combination of both a cognitive and visual perceptual distraction.[80]
A study conducted by Licence et al. supported some of these findings, particularly that those who text while walking significantly alter their gait. However, they also found that the gait pattern texters adopted was slower and more "protective", and consequently did not increase obstacle contact or tripping in a typical pedestrian context.
Patrick Abboud
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