Smartphones and rightward collisions

ABSTRACT

People tend to deviate to the right when walking through a narrow aperture (e.g., a doorway), resulting in a rightward bias in collisions. This study examines the effects of smartphone use on rightward collisions while walking. When pedestrians walk through a narrow aperture, they usually head straight to the perceived centre of the aperture, which is shifted slightly to the right, without updating the estimates. The rightward shift of the perceived centre is attributable to the rightward attentional shift in the extrapersonal space. Pedestrians using smartphones tend to fixate on the phone most of the time and thus tend not to look at their surroundings (i.e., extrapersonal space). Therefore, we predict that smartphone use will reduce rightward collisions. To test this prediction, we used a narrow-doorway task in which participants walked through a narrow doorway either with or without a smartphone. The participants with smartphones used them to perform either verbal or spatial tasks. The number of rightward collisions decreased when the participants used smartphones. The type of task had no effect on the lateral collision biases. These results were interpreted in terms of lateral attentional bias in peripersonal and extrapersonal spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Smartphone use
• laterality in locomotion
• visual attention
• pseudoneglect

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7815085.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by JSPS KAKENHI [grant number 19K03384].