¶ … messaging during simulated driving," Drews et al. (2009) study the effect that text messaging has on driver attention spans and response times. The authors studied drivers in a driving simulation to examine how the drivers responded to texting while driving. Their findings indicate that texting while driving results in poor driver performance with respect to attention span and response time. The authors note the their scores, which are some of the first in the field, indicate that texting while driving is more dangerous than other forms of driver distraction. The authors first provide an extensive literature review discussing the issue of distracted driving. They present evidence of how different forms of distracted driving have been show to affect driver competence. The authors also discuss the issue of texting and driving specifically, noting that there has not been much research to this point on the subject, but that they believe texting and driving has many of the same factors that contribute to poor driver performance with other distraction factors. That the authors are studying the issue from the ergonomic perspective lends them some authority on factors such as eye movements, hands movements and other issues pertaining to texting and driving. The authors also note the popularity of texting and how this adds relevance to their study. They cite consumer surveys that...

This is perhaps a suboptimal sampling of participants because they are controlled for age. However, that they are all in the same age group helps to eliminate other factors such as differential usage of text messaging by people from different generations. The drivers were tested using a driver's simulation program. The name of the program, PatrolSim, and the fact that it is based on the Crown Victoria indicates that this is a program normally used to train law enforcement officers. The simulator has strengths and weaknesses in its use for a study of this nature. A weakness, for example, is that it has a fixed base, which means that it does not accurately simulate movement. Movement could affect the length of time a person texts while driving, for example, by sending a physical cue that the person is moving, and should therefore pay more attention. However, for the purposes of this study the use of a simulator eliminates any physical risk to the drivers or other people on the road, thereby removing considerable ethical liability for the researchers.
The drivers were tested on their text messaging, while being run through the…