<div id="subtitle">Talking while driving not as simple as it sounds</div><div><p>We've all heard the adage about being able to walk and chew gum at the same time. But how about talking and driving?</p><p>With all the attention being focused on distracted driving, there's a new report out showing that driving impairs our ability to comprehend and produce language or -- put simply -- carry on a conversation. </p><p>The University of Illinois study, which used a driving simulator at Illinois's Beckman Institute, involved a stationary Saturn automobile and three display screens featuring simulated roadways and intersections. The experiment's parameters made both driving and language production priorities for the test subjects -- 96 drivers and an equal number of conversation partners. </p><p>The results showed, as the authors put it, that when it comes to "whether driving an automobile interferes with the ability to process and remember language" the answer is "unequivocally affirmative." </p><p>Findings were of the study are published in the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. </p><p>The experiment required the "drivers" to listen to a story through earphones and then accurately retell it to their partners in 30 seconds or less. That task ensured meaningful language production for the test subjects while the driving task challenged them to negotiate an urban roadway environment, obey speed limits, and safely cross busy intersections. </p><p>"Driving negatively impacts story retelling as well as the process of comprehending and encoding stories into long-term memory," the researchers wrote. "In summary, consistency in driving performance while dealing with speech (less driving variability) came at the expense of accuracy in story retelling. When doing the speech task only, drivers and nondrivers were equally good at retelling. When the car was moving, however, drivers displayed a large decline in speech-task performance." </p><p>The stories used in the study were generally three to four sentences long with specific information the "drivers" were expected to remember and accurately convey to their partners. Both "drivers" and "non-drivers" listened to a story through headphones and then retold them to their partner; then the roles were reversed with the partner performing the same task. </p><p>There were three critical task blocks consisting of two single-task blocks (driving-only and speech-only) and one dual-task block (driving while conversing). </p><p>By asking participants to convey the stories accurately, the experiment ensured the subjects used novel sentences and maintained a certain level of engagement. Researchers measured the accuracy of the speech production as well as the memories of the subjects. </p><p>"Driving affects both of those for the worse," said study coauthor Gary Dell. "It makes you tell the story less accurately and you leave more stuff out. It also makes you worse at remembering the stories that are told to you by your conversation partner." </p><p>Unlike previous studies, Dell said, this experiment featured the difficult task of re-telling a story accurately while driving in a challenging environment. </p><p>"We made the language task more interesting and realistic," he added. "The effects of driving on talking in this study were stronger. They were larger than what anybody would have expected because intuitively we think driving as being affected by speech, not the other way around." </p><p>By focusing on how language is affected by driving, the research gives new insight into how difficult it can be to do two things at the same time -- even tasks that are as familiar to most people as driving and talking. </p><p>"If the conversation is really important, they are probably going to focus on the conversation and then their driving will suffer," Dell said. "If the driving is really important, if you are really careful about your driving, the conversation is going to suffer. </p><p>"These things -- even though we practice them a lot and are very skilled at doing them -- are hard things to do and when you put them together in a dual task, they suffer," the researchers concluded. </p><p>The problem of distracted driving has grown to the point where both the Obama administration and Congress have become involved.
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