The study aimed to test whether the driving performance of older and younger adults was affected by talking and holding a conversation on a cell phone. The study analyzed how older adults are penalized by real-world dual-tasking, such as holding a conversation on a cell phone while driving. They said younger adults were more likely to miss road signs, signals and other cars, and had a slower response time when seeing other cars while using and holding a conversation on a cell phone. Even when participants looked in the direction where the object was located, they did not actually see the object because their attention was directed towards the ongoing telephone conversation and towards an internal cognitive context rather than towards the external world. In this experiment they used a car that followed the paradigm in which participants drove on multiple highways with a single task, that is, driving only with and without holding a telephone conversation on a cell phone, and then had the same thing but with a double task, i.e. driving while talking on the cell phone. Participants would follow a car that would randomly hit the brakes at random intervals while driving on the highway. They measured a variety of performance variables such as driving speed, travel distance, brake activation time and other variables that have been shown to influence the likelihood or severity of rear-end collisions. The experimenters predicted that the variables would be altered given the cognitive underpinnings of distraction associated with talking on a cell phone and holding a conversation on it. Previous research has suggested that both the following distance and braking initiation time would be lengthened… in the middle of the paper… where the participant was not using a mobile phone, so how can they claim that the collisions were caused because the participants they were talking on their cell phones. The participants may simply not have been paying attention to what was going on around them, or even really paid attention to the phone conversation, and since the phone conversations were not recorded no one will be able to say this for sure. Not to mention that only four of the dual-task conditioned participants crashed, and once again the cell phone conversation cannot be blamed one hundred percent based on the fact that two of the single-task conditioned participants also crashed. a crash. References Strayer, D. L., & Drews, F. A. (2004). Profiles in driver distraction: Effects of cell phone conversations on younger and older drivers. Human Factors, 46(4), 640-649. doi:10.1518/hfes.46.4.640.56806