Study: People Can’t Walk And Text At The Same Time

Driving and texting at the same time is understood to be dangerous, if not deadly. But what about walking and texting? Researchers at Stony Brook University put 33 men and women, all experienced texters, through a simple test to see how much texting would influence walking. A Stony Brook news release reports that the test subjects were shown a target on the floor eight meters away. Then, after obstructing vision of the target and floor, they were told to walk to the target and stop. They repeated the same walk three times. After each walk, the amount of time it took and the position where each participant stopped was measured. One week later, the test was repeated, this time with vision occluded except for the ability to see a cell phone. One-third of the study group completed the exact same task; one-third completed the task while talking on a cell phone; and one-third completed the task while texting. The researchers found that just talking on the phone made the walkers 16 percent slower than the blindfolded group, and texting made them 33 percent slower than the blindfolded group. Wait, there’s more: those who were texting veered off course 61 percent of the time. Read more from Stony Brook.