Noam Tractinsky

We observed more than 8,800 cases of people passing by an obstacle that was placed at different heights at the entrance to a university cafeteria. Of those cases, 491 were of pedestrians speaking on a cell phone. Overall, 2,422 bumping cases were recorded. Using a cell phone while walking did not increase the risk of bumping into protruding obstacles. The results suggest that the effective visual field of people who are involved in a highly automated, relatively slow- paced task, such as walking, under low rates of information input, is not degraded by speaking on a cell phone.