Profiles in driver distraction : effects of cell phone conversations on younger and older drivers

Drews, Frank A.; Drews, Frank A. · 2004 · ROSA P

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Summary

This study investigates the impact of hands-free cell phone conversations on driving performance, specifically examining whether older adults suffer greater impairments than younger drivers due to age-related declines in dual-task processing. Motivated by the U-shaped curve of traffic fatality rates and established literature on aging and attention, the researchers hypothesized that older adults would exhibit more significant performance deterioration when dividing attention between driving and conversing. The experiment utilized a high-fidelity PatrolSim driving simulator with 40 participants: 20 younger adults (average age 20) and 20 older adults (average age 70). Participants engaged in a car-following paradigm on a simulated multilane freeway, following a pace car that braked at random intervals. The study employed a 2 (age) × 2 (task) factorial design, comparing single-task driving against dual-task driving involving naturalistic, hands-free cell phone conversations with a research assistant. Key dependent measures included brake onset time, following distance, driving speed, and half-recovery time after braking. Results indicated that cell phone use significantly impaired driving performance for both age groups. Compared to single-task conditions, drivers using cell phones exhibited 18% slower brake onset times, maintained a 12% greater following distance, and took 17% longer to recover speed after braking. Crucially, the interaction between age and task was not significant, indicating that older adults did not suffer a disproportionately greater penalty from cell phone use than younger drivers. In fact, the reaction time slowing caused by cell phone use in younger drivers was equivalent to the natural slowing observed in older drivers not using phones. Additionally, the study found a twofold increase in rear-end collisions during dual-task conditions. Aggregated data from this and related studies confirmed that drivers using cell phones were significantly more likely to be involved in collisions than those driving without distraction. The findings challenge the assumption that older drivers are uniquely vulnerable to cognitive distraction while driving, suggesting that the impairments caused by cell phone conversations are equivalent across age groups. The study highlights that the distraction stems from the cognitive load of the conversation rather than manual manipulation of the device, implying that legislation permitting hands-free devices may not mitigate safety risks. Furthermore, the results suggest that highly practiced skills like driving may be less sensitive to age-related dual-task deficits than laboratory-based tasks, though the increased collision risk remains a critical safety concern for all drivers.

Key finding

Cell phone conversation impaired driving performance by approximately 30% across all four measures (brake onset, following distance, speed, half-recovery time) for both younger and older adults equally—dual-task impairment was not exacerbated by age.

Methodology

simulator

Provenance

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Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.

Topics

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• mobile phones
• temporal
• manual
• auditory
• cognitive
• visual manual

Information type

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• Empirical Findings: behavioral performance data, observational prevalence