Cognitively Demanding Object Negotiation While Walking and Texting

Abstract

Cell phone related pedestrian injuries are increasing, but the underlying causes remain unclear. Here, we studied how cell phone use directly affected obstacle avoidance ability. Thirty healthy adults participated. Cognitive capacity was quantified using standard tests. Participants walked on a treadmill in a virtual reality environment with and without performing a texting-like cell phone task. Participants also navigated either ‘no’, ‘simple’ or ‘complex’ object negotiation tasks that directly manipulated the cognitive complexity of this object negotiation task. Cell phone use led to more collisions, delayed responses, and increased variability of responses when navigating objects. Mean object avoidance responses were further delayed for the cognitively more complex object negotiation task. Individuals’ baseline attentional capacity inversely predicted the number of object collisions when participants used the cell phone. Individuals with higher cognitive flexibility (i.e., better ability to switch between tasks) performed better on the cell phone task when they had to negotiate obstacles. Importantly, cognitive ability predicted performance only when both tasks (texting and negotiating objects) were being performed. Thus, using a cell phone while walking introduces a visual distraction that impairs healthy adults’ ability to respond to cognitively demanding object negotiation tasks in their environment.

The Effect of Age on Gait Speed When Texting

“…A recent narrative review of 20 studies, mostly in young healthy adults, concluded that texting was associated with impaired gait performance [10]. Subsequent studies have also shown consistent findings; however, studies continue to be conducted in young adults [11][12][13], or with small sample sizes of as few as 10 participants [12][13][14][15]. Given the increasing use of smartphones and other devices in older age groups [16], the higher dual-task cost of similar activities in older versus younger adults, and the evidence of increasing "pedestrian distraction by technology" [17], there is a need to investigate the impact of texting on walking across age categories.…”

Sensor Fusion for Analysis of Gait under Cognitive Load: Deep Learning Approach

“…In this study we examine gait events influenced by cognitive load. This gives insight into which parts of gait is influenced rather than step time using smartphone [5], or mentoring each participants response while walking on a treadmill [23]. The results are promising, but apart from assessing the particular classification accuracy numbers, the main weakness in the conclusions comes from the limited number of subjects yet included in the currently reported starting phase of this work.…”

Effects of the use of mobile phone on postural and locomotor tasks: a scoping review

“…Compared to the same postural-locomotor task without using a mobile phone, texting mainly induced a slowdown and increased instability when walking on the ground [7,[13][14][15]20,21,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31], on a treadmill [7,[32][33][34][35], with obstacles [36][37][38][39][40][41][42] and on an inclined plane (only when going downhill) [43].…”