Your Eyes Are on the Road and Hands Are on the Wheel — but Where’s Your Head?

Do you think that using a hands-free device is the safe alternative to driving while holding your phone or fidgeting with your car’s controls?
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Today, however, the AAA Foundation is challenging these perceptions with brand-new research on mental distractions, and the suppressed brain activity and impaired driving performance of motorists who are engaged in cognitively-demanding tasks – even when they keep their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel.
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[From the linked study:]
Summary and Conclusions
The goal of the current research was to establish a systematic instrument for
measuring and understanding cognitive distraction in the vehicle, and this has been
accomplished. Using that instrument, we established that there are significant
impairments to driving that stem from the diversion of attention from the task of
operating a motor vehicle, and that the impairments to driving are directly related
to the cognitive workload of these in-vehicle activities. Moreover, compared to the
other activities studied (e.g., listening to the radio, conversing with passengers, etc.)
we found that interacting with the speech-to-text system was the most cognitively
distracting. This clearly suggests that the adoption of voice-based systems in the
vehicle may have unintended consequences that adversely affect traffic safety.
Ref: https://aaafoundation.blogspot.com/2013/06/your-eyes-are-on-road-and-hands-are-on.html