Is listening to radio while you drive dangerous?

There’s a lot of talk about distracted driving these days.

That’s generally taken to mean using a smartphone to text or surf while driving, which can have deadly consequences. But could it also refer to listening to the radio while you drive?

That’s the contention of a new study, which claims drivers’ concentration can be impaired by radio listening.

The British Psychological Society did a study based on the perception load theory, which says people have only a certain amount of attention. Once they’ve used up all that attention, there’s nothing left for anything else.

The BPS tested that theory on 36 subjects using a driving simulator. They were played radio traffic reports as they drove.

Half were asked to complete a simple task, in this case saying when the gender of the voice giving the reports changed. The other half were tasked with something more complex, listening for a certain road.

Then both sets of drivers were exposed to a surprise out their window – an elephant or gorilla standing by the road.

The results were startling. Only 23 percent of those doing the more complex task noticed the animals, compared to 71 percent performing the simple task. The first group also paid less attention to road signs and had longer reaction times to hazards.

The takeaway? It’s not quite time to yank the radio out of your car for safety’s sake. But it certainly is a matter worthy of more research and attention.

“Anything that draws our attention away from driving can be problematic, even if it’s auditory like listening to the radio or having a hands-free phone conversation. That doesn’t mean that we should ban radios in cars, but that we should all be aware of the limits of our attention,” wrote researcher Gillian Murphy.

Tags: driving, driving radio, listening to radio while you drive, radio, radio driving, radio studies, studies