N. Thornton says...

Another question concerns spillage of gas: if youre yacking away its
much easier to spill fuel. I cant draw any conclusions but one has to
at least look at these factors.

Considering how many people refuel their cars each year and the
statistics for refueling fires (150 over the last 10 years) I
draw the conclusion that this isn't a significant problem. At
roughly 50,000 traffic fatalities per year, you are in much more
danger driving to and from the gas station.

As far as talking on your cell phone while driving goes, there is this...

|"Simons and Chabris showed participants a film of two basketball
|teams, one wearing black shirts and the other wearing white.
|These displays were created such that all of the actors were
|partially transparent and thus could simultaneously occupy
|the same locations.
|
|The researchers instructed participants to count how many times
|a basketball passed between members of one team, ignoring the
|other team. Just as Neisser had found two decades earlier,
|many participants didn't notice a woman who walked through
|the scene carrying an open umbrella, even though the woman
|was present for several seconds.
|
|Although Neisser's original findings were striking, they
|stimulated little further research - perhaps in part because
|the results were difficult to incorporate into the mainstream
|science of the time, suggests Ron Rensink, PhD, a psychologist
|and computer scientist at the University of British Columbia.
|
|'Back then, there was still a strong belief that we built
|up a visual representation of all the objects around us and
|held it in a big buffer,' Rensink notes. 'Neisser's work
|flew in the face of that -- people didn't quite know what
|to do with it. There seemed to be a general reluctance to
|pursue it.'
|
|Two decades later, Simons and Chabris's replication has
|received a more welcome reception. The team has now extended
|the original findings by showing that inattentional blindness
|also occurs in more natural displays, in which all of the
|actors are fully visible and opaque. Across a range of
|conditions, more than 25 percent of observers missed a fully
|visible and opaque 'umbrella woman.'
|
|In a particularly dramatic demonstration of the inattentional
|blindness effect, half of the observers failed to notice a
|person wearing a gorilla suit who walked into the middle of
|the basketball game, stopped to face the camera, thumped
|its chest and walked off the screen -- spending a total of
|nine seconds on screen."

Source: http://home.att.net/~jeff.dean/blind.htm




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