Only rare "supertaskers" can balance driving, cellphone use

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The past few years have seen a series of studies that indicate the distractions of cellphone use have an impact on driving skills that rivals intoxication, and various governments are responding by instituting bans on the use of tech toys behind the wheel. Despite laws, extensive evidence and a reasonable degree of public awareness, there's no shortage of people using phones behind the wheel, which suggests that many drivers have a great deal of confidence in their multitasking ability. A new study that will be released by the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review suggests that, even though most of those people probably are bad at multitasking, a small percent of the population positively excels at it.

The basic idea behind the new study is that even though the studies of distracted drivers are pretty definitive, they typically only measure group behavior, which may obscure a small sub-population that's the exception to the rule. So, its authors set up a standard test of distracted driving, and looked for people who had performance that represented an exception to the group trend.

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