For years I have been re-telling the story of a friend's elderly grandmother who developed an amusing driving strategy: she would avoid any route that required her to make a left-hand turn!
A new paper sheds light on the substantial cognitive challenges involved in making left-hand turns...especially when one is talking on a cell phone. Some highlights (via Science Daily)
- Most serious traffic accidents occur when drivers are making a left-hand turn at a busy intersection.
- The researchers were able to show for the first time that making a left-hand turn requires a huge amount of brain activation and involves far more areas of the brain than driving on a straight road or other maneuvers.
- When the drivers were also involved in a conversation, the part of the brain that controls vision significantly reduced its activity as the part that controls monitoring a conversation and attention was activated.
- "Visually, a left-hand turn is quite demanding," Dr. Schweizer said. "You have to look at oncoming traffic, pedestrians and lights, and coordinate all that. Add talking on a cell phone, and your visual area shuts down significantly, which obviously is key to performing the maneuver."
- When those drivers are also talking on a hands-free cell phone, "that could be the most dangerous thing they ever do on the road," said Dr. Tom Schweizer, a researcher at St. Michael's Hospital.
