Summary Of Driver To Distraction

Driver to Distraction by David L. Strayer and William A. Johnston did an excellent job in explaining how one could go about conducting a research study and how that information could be used to answer a scientific question. The way I went about conducting my experiment was to overall assess how the use of cell phone could be dangerous when driving. Strayer and Johnston decided to conducted a similar, but yet different study than mine. In their first experiment that they conducted, they measured how a person drove with distractions -aka a cell phone- was by presenting visual signals that would indicate the participant’s reaction time. The group of forty-eight participants were divided into three groups, each of which would have their own unique distraction. The first group was allowed to listen
The radio station would act as a distraction in hope to understand how sound plays a role when the participant was introduced to traffic signals. The second and third group were randomly assigned a handheld phone or hands free phone. Both groups were asked to talked about a specific event. The person talking to each group, called the confederate, did not know which group had the hand free or handheld device. This was in order to reduce influenced data or any placebo effect. Although the results showed that participants did not miss many of the signals, it still indicated that those who were assigned to the cell phone groups missed more than double compared to those in the radio group (Strayer and William, 2001).
The second experiment was conducted in order to clearly understand the effects cell phone usage had on drivers. The same concept was used from the first experiment but where it differs in is how the experiments went about it. This