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G_j

(40,366 posts) Thu Jan 23, 2014, 01:07 PM Jan 2014

Duh..You can't walk straight while texting, study confirms

http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/personal/2014/01/22/texting-walking-hazards/4647357/

Traci Watson, Special for USA TODAY 5:03 p.m. EST January 22, 2014
<snip>

Schabrun and her colleagues set out to explore exactly how twiddling with a phone affects a person's gait. They had 26 healthy young people walk through a room under the gaze of eight cameras that captured precise details of their motions. As they walked, the subjects either scrolled through a text message or typed the words, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog."

Even though all 26 subjects were seasoned texters, spending an average of 30 minutes a day texting, they still couldn't walk normally as they texted. They unwittingly swerved off a straight line. Their heads did not stay still as they should have, instead swiveling to keep their eyes trained on their touch screens. Their arms, head and torso, rather than moving freely and fluidly, moved stiffly.

"People walk more like a robot" when absorbed in their phones, Schabrun says. "They move everything in line with the phone."

The changes seen by the researchers can put pedestrians at risk. Walkers who drift away from their intended path can stray into traffic or down a steep drop. People who walk stiffly are at greater risk of falling if they hit an obstacle, because their limited movements make them less likely to catch themselves, Schabrun says. The results are reported in today's PLOS ONE, a scientific journal.

It's not entirely clear why the walk of a texting pedestrian is distorted. One possibility, the researchers say, is that the extra head motion feeds bad information to the vestibular system, the apparatus in the inner ear that sends signals to the brain about the body's position in space. That may make it harder for people to walk in a straight line. Or perhaps the multitasking of walking while attending to a text overwhelms the brain, which then prioritizes that cool app over keeping to the straight and narrow.

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