US state struggles with drivers who text

A research monograph prepared by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) stated “reading or sending text or email messages while driving and other distracted driving behaviors lead to more than 420,000 injuries and more than 3,100 traffic deaths every year in the United States.” It further stated “simply knowing the risk of distracted driving has not yet translated into reducing the behavior.”

Maybe that’s because as relatively intelligent human beings, we all think we can multi-task well. But that’s a myth according to a study published in the Psychomomic Bulletin & Review 22(3), 876-883 in 2014. The authors claim a small segment of the population (2.5 percent to be exact) are made up of “supertaskers” with the ability to “dual-task” without an apparent degradation in performance. That leaves out the other 97.5 percent of the population that are applying makeup, eating, tending to a fussy baby in the backseat or . . . cell phone texting while operating a moving vehicle—often at high speeds.