While car manufacturers continue working to provide consumers with increasingly advanced technology in their vehicles, the study states that the “lessons learned from the current research suggest that such voice-based interaction is not risk-free, and in some instances the impairments to driving may rise to the level associated with drunk driving.”
Marcel Just, a psychology professor and director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University, said multitasking always comes with a cost. A person almost never performs a task as well when required to divide attention between activities as compared with giving the one task full attention. There is a limit to the amount of brain activity that can occur at any one time, he said.