Infotainment systems are a big focus of the auto industry right now. The advent of the connected car means large screens are replacing the traditional car stereo, bringing the Internet into our vehicles. Tech companies like Apple and Google are getting in on the act, too.

Ars editor Ron Amadeo has been trying out Google's Android Auto infotainment system, and he took the view that the power of the system is being unfairly crippled by safety concerns . This view isn't universal across the office, however; some of us are skeptical about whether our fellow road users will remain focused on driving rather than on their screens. This dissenting view is bolstered by a recent publication from a trio of researchers at Florida State University (FSU). Cary Stothart and colleagues have looked at how simply receiving a message notification affects one's attention, and the results aren't good news for those who think they can multitask behind the wheel.

Beyond a small minority of drivers, most of us are terrible at driving and doing anything else at the same time. Distracted-driving legislation has banned using hand-operated cell phones in cars in many states. Consequently, automakers, Apple, and Google are all pushing voice controls as a solution for a public that seems to have no desire to stop communicating on their commutes. But even using voice control appears to be little safer than button pushing; both are dismal compared to simply paying attention to the task of piloting several thousand pounds of steel, something we reported last year.

In Stothart's study, published last week in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, the challenge wasn't even as significant as issuing voice commands while concentrating on another task. Instead, the researchers measured the effect of receiving cellphone notifications while trying to focus on a task.

The challenge is called the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART). The SART works as follows. Numbers between one and nine were flashed on a screen about once a second. The participants had to press a button every time they saw a number, unless it was the number 3. After a practice run of 18 screens, there were two recorded blocks of 360 screens, with each number appearing 40 times. The order was randomized for each participant, and the size of the font was varied throughout the test as well.

Participants—college students enrolled in psychology classes at FSU—were randomized to one of three groups. Some didn't receive any notification during the test. Others received a call on their cell phones during the test, and a third group received a text message. In the two notification groups, calls or test messages were sent to participants using a python script synchronized to the start of the second of the two recorded blocks. In total, there were four messages or calls sent, 90 screens apart. The pace of the SART was fast enough that they wouldn't be able to answer their phones and still complete the test.

Importantly, the participants did not know they would be receiving calls or messages during the SART, and those messages were sent to their own phones rather than a lab-supplied device. The participants' own phones were used as the researchers believed that a large part of the potential distraction comes from "the fact that messages contain personally relevant content," something that wouldn't be true had the students known that the message was part of the research study.

Although 212 participants were recruited for the study, data from 46 were excluded because they were interacting with their phones during the test or otherwise not fully concentrating on the SART; a few also had their phones turned off. Per the authors, "[w]e excluded any participant who showed overt signs of not attending to the SART task because we were interested in the performance of participants who were attending to the task but may have been distracted by thoughts about the message or call content." Other studies, such as the one linked above, have already demonstrated that interacting with a mobile phone while performing a different task has large cognitive effects.

In the group that received no notifications during the second block, there was a slight—but not significant—increase in the error rate (i.e., responding to the number 3). The authors say this is consistent with other studies of long, sustained attention tests—we start to lose focus. But this error rate did increase significantly in both the call and the text message groups, and there was no significant difference between them. This happened even though none of them answered the call or text. In other words, merely receiving a notification from one's phone was distracting enough to make an error more likely.

This study will no doubt be unwelcome news to drivers who keep their phone ringers on or their phones in view while at the wheel. Note that Stothart and his colleagues weren't even measuring the effect on attention from answering a call or reading a message; merely getting the alert was enough to reduce one's performance on the attention task.

As luck would have it, this paper came to our attention shortly after I had the chance to try out a distracted driving simulator on a recent trip to Ford's Research and Innovation Center in Dearborn, Michigan. You'll be able to read all about that later today, but suffice to say, it has me thinking very seriously about switching my phone into "do not disturb" mode when I'm driving from now on.

J Exp Psych, 2015. DOI: 10.1037/xhp0000100 (About DOIs).”

Listing image by Sebastian Anthony/Jonathan Gitlin