Gamers Better at Driving w/ Cell Phones?

sl4shd0rk writes "A lot of people think talking on the cell phone while driving is natural, but each time someone asks a question or changes the subject, it's like taking on a new task, Psychologists who study multi-tasking have argued for years about whether these "information bottlenecks" occur because people are inherently lazy, or because they have a fundamental inability to switch from one task to another. Mei-Ching Lien, an assistant professor of psychology at Oregon State University. "Even with a seemingly simple task, structural cognitive limitations can prevent you from efficiently switching to a new task." I have to say that the best ones are those who play a lot of video games," she pointed out. "Those are lab studies, however, and not driving tests." " All I know is that I could get where I was going better if I could shoot turtles at others on the highway.

Re:WTF

[Hope Thelps]

I can multitask fine. I'm often doing 3-4 things at once (playing games while watching TV and talking on IM for example), but this is ridiclous and should NOT be encouraged.

What they seem to ignore is that driving ALREADY means paying attention to multiple things at once. You're looking at the road ahead, and reading the road signs and watching for anything approaching the road from the sides and monitoring the situation behind you in the mirrors and keeping track of your various readouts like the speedometer. This is a lot for anyone to handle.

But it's *not* like having someone next to you

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Unfortunately, like most people, you've got completely the wrong idea of why driving while using a mobile phone is dangerous. At this point, I'd like to pause for a moment to thank the UK government for introducing legislation attacking the wrong problem, and thus giving millions of drivers a false sense of security when they're using a hands-free kit.

In fact, if you look at the studies done in the UK and elsewhere before the explicit ban was introduced in the UK, the big problem is the loss of concentration. The physical incapacity caused by tying up one hand obviously doesn't help, but it makes far, far less of a difference to road safety.

The reason that talking on a phone isn't like talking to a person next to you is that a person next to you will sense when you need to concentrate, because they can see that you're approaching a hazard for example, and they'll shut up and not distract you while you navigate around the hazard. Someone you're talking to on a phone can't do that, and will change the subject, ask you a question, or otherwise attract your attention just as much when you're approaching a potential danger as when you're driving on an open road without another car in sight. Whether you're holding a little box near your ear or listening to someone through a speaker doesn't affect this at all.

If the UK government really wanted to improve the level of road safety rather than score cheap political points, they would have banned all mobile phone use while driving. Then again, the whole idea of such a specific offence seems a bit redundant when you already have legislation making dangerous driving illegal in general. Presumably someone thought it would draw more attention to the specific and increasing problem, or they were just after the political points.

In summary, this is wrong:

If you want/need to use a phone while driving get a hands free kit.

For most people, you simply don't need to use a phone while driving, period. If you want to talk to someone elsewhere while on the move, get someone else to drive. Doing anything less will dramatically increase your risk of having an accident, as surely as driving while drunk, tired or stoned.

Gaming lets you react to emergencies

[doc modulo]

A friend of mine says Counter-Strike saved his life. He was driving along when, from the edge of his vision, he saw someone throw something from the overpass onto the road.

Because of all the CS playing he was more perceptive of movement and he was trained in how to react to dangerous objects moving your way (grenade dodging). CS will also teach you to do all this quickly, otherwise you die.

He judged the trajectory of the stone and "decided" to break hard, the stone smashed into the road just ahead of him. The stone broke and the fragments cracked his windshield but at least he was alive.

He says he would have headbutted the stone at 100 Km/H if he hadn't been a games player.

Is it multitasking? Maybe, he didn't have a good description of the psycho who threw the stone. It was fast task-switching or maybe his brain put all it's multitasking power into the stone evasion stuff and didn't bother with the guy on the bridge because of that.