The Problem

Traffic accidents killed over 34,000 and injured more than 1.8 million individuals in 2017 alone (NHTSA, 2017). These casualties have financial repercussions into the billions ($44 billion; CDC, 2013), not to mention lasting effects in lost wages, physical damages, and burdens on families and friends. Driver distractions are the leading cause of the high numbers of accidents (World Health Organization, 2011).

Why do drivers handling vehicles, often at high speeds, think they can take their eyes and minds off the road? What are they accomplishing by doing so?

We’re all busy. We live and breathe busy. Of course we’re going to use our time to the utmost. That includes our driving commutes. You know the type who’s on their phone, getting “business” taken care of on that traffic ridden commute. Maybe you’re that person.

How efficient are we actually being? How safe are we actually driving?

Our brains are on the conversation, our eyes mindlessly on the road. The fact that we still have some capacity to drive means that our entire minds are not on the business conversation.

How good is our recall memory of the work we ‘got done’? And how often do we misremember what was said?

If you’ve heard of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, you’ll know it’s a useful mental phenomena to instigate false memories. Because it is a standardized and vetted technique, we could readily utilize it in an applied setting, such as driving.

Participants arrived at our driving simulator lab. They practiced driving, and then listening to a short associated word list (my voice recorded at equal intervals and volume). We then asked them to immediately, verbally recall as many of the 15 word list as they could.

Let’s combine the two tasks now in counterbalanced order.

Participants

Not surprising, drivers had poor memory recalling words overall when driving compared to just recalling the word lists. That’s a basic finding of mental load (driving) interfering with another mental task (memory of non-driving items).

But more interesting, participants had elevated, incorrect recall of words never stated in any of the associated word lists. They falsely remembered information that never actually occurred.

How’s that for a productive morning commute?

Notice I never said the word doctor.

A simple change in behavior would allow drivers to be productive on their commutes, whether that change was to take public transport where available, carpool, or bypass the issue by utilizing company remote-work policies.

Of course, advancing self-driving vehicle technology can solve this problem entirely!

Roediger, H. L. III, & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 21, 803–814.

Related posts:

I recently edited a photo book created by a Taungurung photographer. The book documented the finding and unearthing of Aboriginal artefacts on Taungurung country, undertaken as part of an Aboriginal…

Among all the bad advice out there, one article stands out in my memory. It was an article in The Chronicle telling grad students how to be more responsible with their money. There was one problem…

The TraceTogether Token is a hardware device designed specifically for contact tracing purposes in our fight against COVID-19. It acts as the physical counterpart to the TraceTogether app and forms…