Science News - October 9, 2010

11 percent

Proportion of U.S. drivers using a cell phone at any given daytime moment

16 percent

Proportion of U.S. traffic fatalities linked to distracted driving

Why cell phone talkers are annoying
Unpredictable ‘halfalogues’ distract unwilling eavesdroppers

By Bruce Bower

They’re everywhere — yammering on the subway, yukking it up on sidewalks, yakking away in restaurants. It’s the invasion of the cell phone–slinging, superannoying attention snatchers!

Cell phone users irritate so mightily because their background chatter forcibly yanks listeners’ attention away from whatever they’re doing, says psychology graduate student Lauren Emberson of Cornell University. Overhearing someone spewing intermittent exclamations into a handheld gadget lacks the predictability of hearing a two-way exchange and thus proves inherently unsettling, Emberson and her colleagues report online September 3 in Psychological Science.

That uncertainty makes it harder to focus on one’s own task at hand, be it reading a book, contemplating a work presentation or driving a car, the team proposes.

The new results raise the possibility that drivers operate vehicles poorly not only while talking on cell phones ( SN: 3/13/10, p. 16) but also when passengers gab on the devices. Further research will look for such an effect in people operating driving simulators.

“Drivers should be aware that one’s attention is drawn away from current tasks by overhearing someone on a cell phone, at least in our attention-demanding lab tasks, and that this effect is beyond conscious control,” Emberson says.

Overhearing a whole conversation does not divert listeners’ attention, the investigators assert.

Their findings appear relevant to real-world behaviors, remarks psycholinguist Benjamin Bergen of the University of California, San Diego. Individuals who overhear cell phone chatter often try to guess what the unheard talker has just said or thought, contributing to distraction, he proposes.

“I bet people are often trying to fill in the blanks when they hear half of a conversation,” he says.

Cell phone talkers’ louder-than-usual voices may also divide others’ attention, suggests psychologist David Strayer of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

Emberson’s team had 24 college students perform two attention tasks both in silence and while hearing each of three types of speech played through headphones—two women talking to each other on cell phones in a dialogue, a woman talking on a cell phone to an unheard person in a “halfalogue” and a woman recapping a cell phone conversation in a monologue.

One attention task involved keeping
a mouse-controlled cursor as close as
possible to a moving dot on a computer
screen. Volunteers tried to maintain focus
on specific visual cues, a skill needed for
driving a car, Emberson says.

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