Do you often struggle to see what's right in front of you?
You might be one of the many people with 'inattentional blindness' – a brain glitch that makes it hard to clock unexpected objects in our visual field, and chatting on the phone while driving especially risky.
For the numerous people living with inattentional blindness, objects that are fully visible can go completely unnoticed when their focus is elsewhere, says psychology and neuroscience professor Anthony Lambert.
When this hidden brain glitch is brought to the visually complex task of driving, conducting a phone conversation – even without our hands – is too cognitively demanding to be safe, he said.
Although we’ve now banned texting and handheld phone chats while driving, New Zealand law-makers needs to catch up on the scientific proof that hands-free conversations in the driver's seat carry the same high crash risk, Professor Lambert tells Saturday Morning.
Mark Stuckey
Related stories:
The task of driving requires a lot of visual attention and people with inattentional blindness can be so locked into what they expect to see that they somehow miss what is actually there, said Professor Lambert, such as an approaching cyclist.
While there is no increased crash risk from chatting to a passenger in the car, he says, having a phone conversation behind the wheel seems to max out the mental resources of many drivers and impair their ability to pick up information through the eyes - such as cyclists or pedestrians popping into view.
“You're trying to understand what the person saying, and you're trying to formulate what you're going to say in response.”
"If you're making that difficult right hand turn onto Dominion road in the morning, your passenger is not going to ask. They're not going to talk to you while you're in the midst of making that manoeuvre" - Anthony Lambert.
Curated Lifestyle
Inattentional blindness – which was coined by two American psychologists in the '90s – hasn’t yet been clearly linked to personality, cognitive ability or even so-called attention disorders such as ADHD, Lambert said.
It seems a multitude of us have a tendency to inattentional blindness somehow "built-in" to our visual and attentional mechanisms.
"People [with inattentional blindness] are really engaged in one particular task, and the information is s certainly arriving at the eyes – it's certainly progressing to visual parts of the brain – but because attention is engaged on something else that information doesn't actually get lifted from those initial stages of visual processing into awareness."
A classic filmed experiment that revealed inattentional blindness in 50 percent of its official participants is below (and only works for an unofficial self-test if you haven't seen or heard of it before):
Tony Lambert is a Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Auckland.
University of Auckland
