Very Brief Summary of Cell Phone and Driving Literature
Art Kramer, October 16, 2006

By permission of Art Kramer, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Illinois, Director of the Biomedical Imaging Center at UIUC, and the Co-Director of the NIH Center on Healthy Minds.

• Epidemiological studies, in multiple countries, have repeatedly found that the risk of a collision when using a cell phone is approximately 4 times higher than the risk of a collision when a cell phone was not being used.

     ( e.g. Redelmeier & Tibshirani, 1997;  McEvoy et al., 2005)

•   Hand’s free and hand held cell phones reveal similar driver performance costs, with regard to accidents, recognition of important information in the environment, memory for information seen in the environment, and response (brake) times to critical events.

     (Horrey & Wickens,  2006;  Redelmeier & Tibshirani, 1997; Strayer & Drews, 2006; Strayer & Johnson, 2001; Strayer et al., 2003)

• Listening to a radio does not appear to have an adverse effect on driving performance

     (Consiglio et al., 2003; Strayer & Johnston, 2001; McCarley et al., 2004)

• Use of a hand’s free cell phone during simulated driving results in more degraded driving performance and more accidents than driving with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08% weight/volume.

     (Strayer, Drews & Crouch, 2006).

• The use of speech-based e-mail systems (the wave of the future ....?) have a negative impact of driving performance.

     (Jamson et al., 2004; Lee et al., 2001)