Originally Posted by
AndrewP
They should ban operation of all electronic devices while driving. Searching for a channel on the CD or or reprogramming destination in GPS is as distracting as texting. Maybe all the controls except volume should be deactivated when the transmission is in drive.
There's an SAE committee on Safety and Human Factors, that did a study on distraction, and came up with a standard. One may argue if it should go farther, but it pretty well represented what could be agreed on about 6 years ago. It states that control actions for in-vehicle equipment should not take longer than 15 seconds. For the driver to "sample" the driving environment every 15 seconds is enough, in the context of infrequent tasks to adjust the audio system or climate control. This ruling has been used to support the decision most automakers have made, to prevent destinations from being selected or new ones entered while the car is moving. I think those actions would be much more distracting than phone conversations because they involve text processing, a complex human interface, and an unnatural way of entering text and making commands. OTOH, a dear friend of mine (a serious classical musician) once drove through a red light because she was concentrating on the music playing on the audio system. That's a great example of cognitive distraction.
I'm not a cognitive scientist, but I've worked with them for years as part of advanced equipment design. I also stayed with them at a Holiday Inn ...