Science strikes again

[Omega]

"Yeah, I'm on my way home." "That's funny." "Uh-huh." "What? No! I thought you were -- " "Oh, ok." Listening to someone talk on a cell phone is very annoying. A new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds out why: Hearing just one side of a conversation is much more distracting than hearing both sides and reduces our attention in other tasks.

Lauren Emberson, a psychology Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, came up with the idea for the study when she was taking the bus as an undergraduate student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. "I was commuting for 45 minutes by bus every day and I really felt like I couldn't do anything else when someone was on a cell phone," she says. "I couldn't read. I couldn't even listen to my music. I was just so distracted, and I started to wonder about why that could be."


For the experiment, Emberson recorded two pairs of female college roommates as they had a cell phone conversation. She recorded each conversation both as a dialogue, in which both women could be heard by a listener, and as a "halfalogue" in which only one side of the conversation could be heard, the same as overhearing a cell-phone conversation. She also recorded each woman recapping the conversation in a monologue. Then she played the recordings at volunteers as they did various tasks on the computer that require attention, such as tracking a moving dot using a computer mouse.


Sure enough, volunteers were much worse at the concentration tasks when they could only hear half of the conversation. Emberson thinks this is because our brains more or less ignore predictable things, while paying more attention to things that are unpredictable. When both sides of the conversation are audible, it flows predictably, but a cell phone conversation is quite unpredictable. Emberson conducted the study with Gary Lupyan of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Michael Goldstein of Cornell University, and Michael Spivey of the University of California-Merced.


"It's definitely changed my own etiquette," says Emberson. "I'm a lot more sensitive about talking on the phone in public. It has a really profound effect on the cognition of the people around you, and it's not because they're eavesdropping or they're bad people. Their cognitive mechanism basically means that they're forced to listen."
The article, "Overheard Cell-Phone Conversations: When Less Speech Is More Distracting" was recently published in the journal Psychological Science.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0921101344.htm

Who knew?

[Aimless]

I did it was a fun study

[Omega]

...Well, it's really not common knowledge for my peers. I, for example, found the article when i was perusing the internet randomly last night. I'm pretty sure I'm part of a persecuted minority at the school---the nerdious familiaris.

How did you know anyways, lol? Or rather what field do you work in?

[Aimless]

I work in the field of surfing the internet it made the rounds of the usual tech/science/nerd blogs a while back. We are curious monkeys

[Omega]

What's your disposable income?

[Dreadnaught]

I ride the train a lot for work and it's great to know this because it's tough to figure out what annoys me about hearing cellphone conversations.

We have this cellphone-free zone called the "quiet car", but sometimes people break the rule and it makes everyone else in the car so mad until they explode at the offender. Or get the conductor to do it.

[Flixy]

I think it's fascinating to guess what others are talking about (especially if it includes mentioning police, locking doors, etc.), and if I don't want to hear it I just listen to music myself.

[Dreadnaught]

I don't think the choice should be between listening to someone's conversation and putting on headphones. What about the pleasure of just riding the train with as little extra noise as possible?

[Flixy]

We have the quiet cars too, but I don't really know if they work or not, since I generally do not sit in them Maybe it works? Would be nice if it did. I for one would like to have a conversation or pick up my phone if I am called while in a train, because I am on one a lot. Would be annoying if I can't talk or call each time..

[Dreadnaught]

So basically you are the reason I have to go to the Quiet Car to sleep.

[Omega]

Hey! you should thank him. You never knew when someone might touch you inappropriately while your sleeping. Show some respect.

[Flixy]

So basically you are the reason I have to go to the Quiet Car to sleep.

Hey, at least I avoid the quiet car. I am quiet most of the time, but if my phone rings I want to pick it up. Especially since I usually take trains to meet people, something might have come up. I keep it pretty quiet though, just normal level conversation. But I travel by train a lot, I work in it (last week I had an half hour phone call to the IRS while in a train), and it would annoy me if I can't open my mouth at all. Do you also complain that people talk to eachother on the streets, or in a bar?

Keep in mind that our trains are more like subway network stretched around the country, I suppose your trains are a bit different. But when I traveled with friends on an Amtrak train, we also played cards and talked I am quiet on night trains, for what it's worth.

@Omega, seen Eurotrip recently? Anyway, the bigger threat is pickpockets on night trains (that happens a lot)

[Omega]

What's Eurotrip? and that makes sense. I'm surprised no one has been molested yet.

Dread, how do you wake up when your stop comes anyways?

[Flixy]

It's a movie, in one of the scenes they get harassed in a train by a touchy Italian whenever they ride through a tunnel