Use of Cellphones and Reaction Time
Mobile phones usage has spread in recent years, united states alone had 118 million subscribers by 2001, it is estimated that currently, people spent 60% of their driving time on their cellphones. Previous research has shown that there is a relationship between cell phone usage and reaction time, the reaction time is one of the critical methods utilized in studying a people fast coordinated peripheral movements response and central information processing speed. Cellular phones have adverse implications particularly when used during and activity that requires the high attention of the mind such as driving, operating heavy machinery or even cooking, the purpose of this study, therefore, seeks to determine the effects of cell phone usage on reaction time.
Reaction time is the total length of time that a person takes to respond to a stimulus (Shah et al. 2010). It is not influenced by the social-cultural influences; it indicates purely how the biological brain process is efficient or dysfunction. For a reaction to occur, the sense organs are activated by a stimulus and impulse is sent to the brain, from the brain it is sent back to accomplish the required task by executing the movements. Prolonged simple reactions result in slow Reaction Time.
The given factors below have an impact on the Reaction Time
• Perception: This is the process of feeling listening to or seeing the stimulus
• Processing: This is the process of understanding the stimulus to take the necessary action in response. It is very crucial to understand the stimulus very well and differentiate it for good reaction time.
• Response: this is the actions that a person takes in after they have understood the stimuli Motor agility is crucial for a person to be able to respond in time to the stimuli
perceiving, processing and responding are actions that are undertaken in matters of milliseconds, although reaction time can be affected by factors such as
The complexity of the stimulus-complex stimulus takes more time to process than others; this is because more information has to be processed to respond.
• Familiarity, expectations, andpreparation: familiar stimuli that a person has experienced before will take a shorter time than unfamiliar and unexpected stimuli that a person had no prior preparation too. Familiar stimuli had less information to prepare and hence the response time is going to be shorter.
• State of the organism: another factor that affects the stimuli is the condition that the organism or the person is in some conditions such as fatigue, high temperature, old age or being in the influence of alcohol or other drugs adversely affects the detection, processing and responding of the stimuli.
• Stimulated sensory modality: the response rate for auditory and visual stimulus is different, auditory response takes a shorter time to process than visual stimuli and hence resulting in a difference in the reaction time.
Reaction time is very crucial in the daily life of all organisms, and it ensures efficiency and agility in responding to various stimuli and situations like avoiding danger and responding to situations like driving, laying sports, and having a conversation, during an interview response time is very important to ensure a timely and accurate response. Good response time is very crucial and helpful in several situations, to ensure good response time, it is important that the information received is well interpreted and processed.
When one is using a cellphone his/, her attention is taken onto the phone, and it distracts the cognitive ability of the person to access information from a complex visual task for instance during driving as it has been demonstrated by various research. For instance, when a driver is using a phone and driving, his/ her attention swayed to think of what to say next during phone call conversation. (Maples et al. 2008)
According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, "reaction time is the time required for a subject to initiate a prearranged response to a defined stimulus" (Merriam-Webster.com) This shows, the reaction time is the time it takes someone to act to a situation. Reaction time is used every day, for example, when a dodgeball is coming at your face, how quickly you duck is how fast you reacted to the situation. It's helpful to have a fast reaction time because that means you can react quickly to a situation. According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, "Attention is the act or state of applying the mind to something" (Merriam-Webster.com). This involves with reaction time because your reaction time slows down when the driver's attention is getting pulled away from the thing they are supposed to be focusing on. Having attention with your surroundings while driving is very important, and when you're on the phone it pulls your attention away from your surroundings and distracts you.
According to research done by (Monke, 2012) on the effects of reaction time while using a phone on students, the results showed that the average time taken by the student to react without using to a cell phone was 333 milliseconds with the correct answers average percentage of 97.9 percent. The Reaction time on average when using the cell phone was 607 milliseconds with the correct answers' average percentage of 68 percent. When a student was on the cellphone the average time increased by 274 milliseconds and the resulting percent of correct answers went down by 29.9 percent.
From the findings of the above experiment, when a person is distracted the reaction time is longer than when not distracted by the phone. Reaction time is the ability to respond to a stimulus on time, a study by (Monke, 2012) proves that if a person is driving and talking over the cell phone, his/her attention is distracted and the time he will take to respond to an emergency brake would be longer.
The time taken between the application of a stimulus and the onset of response is what is referred to as response time. It is an important factor for animal survival; it is important to test in studying conduction along the nervous pathway (Solanki, 2012).
Research conducted by (Haque et al. 2013) argued that the use of mobile phone while driving reduces the field of view of the drivers. They additionally confirmed that drivers are distracted by cell phone usage, and their reaction time is greatly slowed, events that originated from the driver's periphery was problematic for the driver to detect and this raises a serious safety threat, those resulted in driver opting to speed selection in order to compensate for the distracted mind in the central but not the peripheral vision. The speeds selection was different according to the level of distraction from the central vision.
There are several events originating from driver's periphery that includes pedestrians' bicyclists, drivers using cellphone while driving poses a danger to these people. It is s significant safety concern that needs to be addressed immediately, it is illegal to use cell phones while driving in most countries of the world, and if one is got, this offense attracts a hefty fine. In reality, usage of cell phones while driving has resulted in accidents, due to long reaction time that could have been saved if the driver had not been distracted by the cell phone, either texting or calling while driving results in a distraction and therefore, drivers should refrain from using cell phones while driving (Washington and Haque. 2013,).
According to a study by Australia researchers, cellphones have Electromagnetic radiation that affects the way a person makes a snap decision when driving it is evident that reaction time is slowed on both the simple and complex reactions, for instance, choosing to respond when there are several alternatives.
The researchers found out that exposure to an electromagnetic radiation equivalent to being on a call for 30 minutes has a huge impact on real-life equivalents, for instance braking decisions during driving, making conversation on a cell phone results in a great distraction either from the distraction caused by the conversation or the distraction caused by the electromagnetic radiation as from the research (DOMBECK, 2015).
Use of cellphones divides the attention into two parts, that is listening and responding to the conversation and watching the road problems. Cognitive psychology argued that dividing attention among two tasks results in the slowed down performance of those activities. This further adds more evidence on the effects of cell phone usage on Reaction Time (DOMBECK, 2015). Cellphone usage distracts the activities of the brain making it slow down, the reception and response to stimuli are therefore affected, and this would result to a long time in responding to a stimulus.
Also, radiation emanating from the cellphones exerts a real, short-term effect on the brain activity and hence adversely affecting general reaction time of the brain. Talking on the cell phone change the brain performance making a person respond slowly, this results in impaired reaction time; it would be devastating if a person were driving a car or operating big machinery since it would take longer for the brain to react on dealing with emergencies.
In this condition the delay in reaction time is different from the previously identified effect on the divided attention, in this case, only the radiation effects that slow down operations of the brain, the combination of the two factors is very much devasting and could be much very dangerous in case of an emergency that requires quick response.
Researchers at Miami University found out that the reaction time for braking when an individual was driving a car was 24 percent slower when the individuals were distracted by driving while using the cell phone than when they were not,
If the car was traveling at 65 miles per hour that 24 seconds could be a very long distance enough to cause a devastating accident, this is according to associate professor, William P. Berg
Various behavioral and experimental studies have focused on the effects that cell phone usage has on reaction time, although researches slightly differ on the behavioral results found, they come to a final universal conclusion that cell phone usage hurts the Reaction Time. The impact that driving while using cellphone o the reaction time is a phenomenal referred to as inattentional blindness or change blindness (Strayer, Drews & Johnston, 2003), this is whereby a person that is focusing attention on a particular task will fail in noticing an unexpected stimulus even if they are looking at it directly (Simons &Chabris, 1999).
Conclusion
In conclusion, the purpose of this study is to explore the effects of divided attention on response time. The information that has been gathered from various sources in this paper showed that the cognitive task involved in processing a conversation greatly reduces the visual field of a driver and any other user, usage of cellphone distracts the mind resulting in slower responses to various stimuli. This means that some of the events may not be seen during cellphone conversation. This adds up to visions symptoms, leaving little reserves to focus on integrating complex visual information. Advancement of technology affects every aspect of daily life that includes driving task, machinery operation, cooking food, operating computer, and many more activities that require our attention. Cellphone usage constricts the peripheral awareness artificially measured by visual field making the person less aware of the surroundings and more susceptible to the accident.
References
Haque, Md. Mazharul & Washington, Simon (2013) Effects of mobile phone distraction on drivers’ reaction times. Journal of the Australasian College of Road Safety, 24(3), pp. 20-29.
Shah, C., Gokhale, P.A., & Mehta, H.B. (2010). Effect of Mobile Use on Reaction Time.
Simons, D. J., &Chabris, C. F. (1999). Gorillas in our midst: Sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception, 28, 1059-1074.
Mehta H.B, Gokhale, Shah Chinmay (2009) Effect of Mobile Use on Reaction Time, Al Ameen Charitable Fund Trust, Bangalore 3(2):160-164
Terao Y., Okano T., Furubayashi T., Ugawa Y. (2006) Effects of thirty-minute mobile phone use on visuomotor reaction time. Clinical Neurophysiology, 117 (11), pp. 2504-2511
Maples W.C., DeRosier W., Hoenes R., Bendure R., Moore S. (2008) The effects of cell phone use on peripheral visionOptometry, 79 (1), pp. 36-42.