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More Distracting Fun From the DFT

An interesting play-it-at-home distracted driving challenge from the DFT. I missed five questions and my pedestrian spotting was off by one.

Obviously we aren’t asked to assign values to pedestrians while driving, nor hit space bars; but then again, we don’t have to steer, brake, turn, merge, check mirrors, or do anything else in this simulation (mind you, many U.S. drivers wouldn’t stop anyway at those marked crosswalks, unless there was a pedestrian in dead center).

(hat tip to Mind Hacks)

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 7:58 am and is filed under Traffic Psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “More Distracting Fun From the DFT”

  1. Will Says:
    January 21st, 2009 at 12:34 pm

    Ugh. This conclusion sucks because the mobile phone had nothing to do with missing the details. Just the act of only concentrating on red and yellow shirts (and ignoring the 0 point gray ones) is enough to make you miss those details.
    Sure, the mobile is there to distract you too, but you could replicate the same thing with 95% accuracy if you removed the mobile from the equation.
    I, missed 2 pedestrians and missed 8 questions, probably because I had difficulty understanding her accent.

  2. Will Says:
    January 21st, 2009 at 12:35 pm

    I, also, used, too, many, commas, and, would, like, to, edit, that, previous, response.

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Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

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