Proceed At Your Own Peril

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It seems humans can’t do anything well while texting.

We’ve learned that texting while driving, texting while operating a train, and even texting while riding a bike can lead to accidents ranging from the routine to the tragic. Now a pair of undergraduates at the UO have uncovered a new weakness: texting while walking.

With our noses buried in a smartphone, they’ve discovered, we can’t even walk down the street without putting ourselves at risk for injuries and accidents.

Taylor Kay and Deborah Wang, who received their degrees in human physiology last spring, were curious about something they saw happening every day on campus. Under the direction of graduate student Amy Lo, they put together two experiments that tested how well people could follow a path, avoid obstacles, or make sudden stops while texting and walking.

Kay’s experiment involved people walking an oval course in the UO’s biomechanics lab and stepping over obstacles that were 10 percent of their body height (in others words, a person 5 feet, 6 inches tall—66 inches—would step over obstacles that were 6.6 inches high). Wang’s test involved people walking the course and stopping when a red line was suddenly projected on the floor ahead of them.

The subjects weren’t actually texting on smartphones. But they did have a device—an iPod Touch—in their hands, and they used it to do a “Stroop test,” which is a standard cognitive test that measures attention: The word “green” appears on the screen, for example, but in blue type; the subject then taps a color that corresponds to the color of the type (blue), not the color the word represents (green).

As they walked, the subjects did the test while a 10-camera motion-capture system monitored their gait, center of balance, speed, and direction—data that was analyzed with special software.

You can imagine the results. In the experiments, people with their eyes on a device walked slower, had worse balance (as measured by their swaying and center of balance), and generally were less in tune with their surroundings. In fact, these college-age test subjects could have been mistaken for their grandparents when it came to keeping their balance as they walked.

“They swayed,” Kay (left) said, “the way elderly people sway.”

But there was one thing students did well while walking and using a handheld device: use a handheld device.

Kay’s test showed that students did as well on the Stroop test whether they were walking the course with obstacles or without. In Wang’s experiment, subjects were a tiny bit slower on the Stroop test but just as accurate, regardless of whether there were unexpected stops in the path ahead.

In other words, the subjects put more of their attention into their devices at the expense of the world around them, further evidence that digital distractions are just that. “You do these things at a cost,” Kay said.

“This experiment adds data to what we already knew previously,” Wang (right) added. “It also gives future researchers a jumping-off point for additional research.”

—By Greg Bolt