Chatting on hands-free phone ‘just as dangerous for drivers as using a mobile’ new research finds

Chatting on hands-free phone 'just as dangerous for drivers as using a mobile' new research finds

Chatting on a hands-free phone while driving can be just as dangerous as using a mobile at the wheel, say researchers.

The Transportation Research journal says a study found that drivers having conversations which sparked their visual imagination detected fewer road hazards than those who didn’t.

They also focused on a smaller area of the road ahead of them and failed to see hazards, even when they looked directly at them.

Psychologists at the University of Sussex warn that this shows the risks of even hands-free phone conversations.

The researchers found that conversations may use more of the brain’s visual processing resources than previously understood.







Dr Hole said: “Conversations are more visual than we might expect, leading drivers to ignore parts of the outside world in favour of their inner ‘visual world’ – with concerning implications for road safety.”

The Sussex psychologists ran two experiments in which participants performed a video-based hazard-detection task. I


For half of these distracted participants, the sentences encouraged the use of visual imagery (e.g. “a five pound note is the same size as a ten pound note”) whereas for the other half, the sentences did not (e.g. “Leap years have 366 days”).


These impairments were worse for the participants who were distracted by imagery-inducing statements.

Dr Hole says anything which causes drivers to imagine something visually, including passengers, can interfere with driving performance because the two tasks compete for similar processing resources.

He said: “However, chatty passengers tend to pose less of a risk than mobile phone conversations. They will usually moderate the conversation when road hazards arise. Someone on the other end of a phone is oblivious to the other demands on the driver and so keeps talking. And talking in person involves non-verbal cues which ease the flow of conversation. Phone conversations are more taxing because they lack these cues.”

In the second experiment, the researchers compared undistracted participants to ones who were distracted by a different visual imagery task.


Distracted participants were more likely to miss hazards in their peripheral vision due to the “visual tunnelling.”