Driven to distraction
archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified
Summary
Strayer & Strayer (2015) reply article in Ergonomics in Design responding to commentaries on their target article on cognitive distraction. Authors discuss the relationship between cognitive distraction and crash risk, defend the development of their cognitive distraction scale (effect-size-based combination of primary, secondary, subjective and physiological measures linearly transformed to a 1=single-task to 5=OSPAN scale), and weigh issues of self-regulation, appropriate baselines, and satisficing. They argue experimental and naturalistic methods diverge on cell-phone crash risk because controlled experiments suppress self-regulation. They reference the FAA 'sterile cockpit' rule as a precedent for restricting non-essential cognitive activity during critical operation phases.
Key finding
Cognitive distraction maps onto crash risk monotonically under controlled experimental conditions, but self-regulatory processes in naturalistic settings can mask the relationship; the cognitive distraction scale combines primary/secondary/subjective/physiological measures via standardized effect sizes and is robust to alternative weightings.
Methodology
Theoretical/commentary article responding to invited expert commentaries; describes the cognitive-distraction scale construction (mean-centering and SD-scaling each DV, computing effect sizes, equal-weight averaging across primary task, secondary task, subjective, and physiological measure families, then linear rescaling to 1-5).
Sample size: No new sample (commentary/reply).
Quality score: 5 / 5