Inventing Iron Man by E. Paul Zehr Page B

“simple” as an automobile and a phone don’t mix. Let alone considering the implications for piloting Iron Man.
    The ability to multitask also changes with age. Most people realize that older adults have an increased chance of falling when standing or walking. Many changes in the body make this come about, but some of it has to do with a reduced ability to control the body moving in the environment. That is, to manage all the information available. So, if someone has to walk and pay attention to the terrain—like walking down a staircase—carefully and think of something else they are managing many different pieces of information at once. This is often explored in scientific research using what is called a “dual task” paradigm.
    I mentioned above the expression of “walking and chewing gum at the same time.” Maybe a better one is to try rubbing your stomach.Then try tapping your head with the other hand. Now try doing them at the same time. You likely noticed that you actually didn’t have to pay much attention to either rubbing or tapping but when you did them at the same time you really had to think about it. Especially at the start. If you really want to make it harder, try to tap your left or right foot as well. Your ability to manage many tasks is limited and goes down as you age. So, in the dual task paradigm, older adults who have to do more than one thing wind up doing both things poorly. How does that relate to Iron Man? Running around as Iron Man involves a lot more than a “dual task”! I suggest it would be more like “centi-tasking”—doing a hundred things at once.
    But, as with so many other things, a lot of a person’s ability to multitask has to do directly with his or her level of training. That is, you cannot just jump into the Iron Man suit of armor (or any technology) and use it without training. It turns out that even the ability to avoid or reduce attention conflict in using a cell phone can be trained. James Hunton from Bentley College and Jacob Rose from Lincoln University did a neat study to look at this. They used a “simulated” driving course and had people have no conversation, a real conversation with a passenger, and a real conversation over a hands-free cell phone. They were keen to go beyond the small attentional issue of actually holding a phone because the biggest problem for attention is the conversation with someone who isn’t physically in the line of sight. As you might guess from the other things we talked about, they found that even the hands-free cellular phone call increased the number of driving incidents and the number of crashes drivers had. By the way, a conversation with a real passenger led to increased problems also, but nowhere near the cell phone level. The extra twist was that they compared people who had pilot training with those who didn’t have training as pilots. The pilots did better, much better actually, than ordinary folks. It isn’t clear yet if those pilots got better at multitasking by the practice that occurred in training to be a pilot, or if they were better multitaskers to start. Pilots also expressed less desire to “visualize” or “see” the people they were talking to than did the nonpilots.
    So far this kind of research suggests a surprising result. A major issue is the need to use some of the brain’s limited attention to try to imagine the person being spoken to. This, combined with the fact that, unlike a passenger in the vehicle who can see what is going on, people on cell phones cannot modify their patterns of speech andconversation. Together, these impediments to attention are a dangerous mix and threaten necessary attention for driving safely. I have replotted some of Hunton and Rose’s data and put an example together in figure 4.1 . For contrast, I have used Jim Rhodes as an example of a pilot and Ivan Vanko (aka “Whiplash”)