Final answer:
Cognitive distractions lead to a decrease in attention to the road while driving due to engaging in mentally demanding tasks such as texting. Attentional resources become stretched, increasing the chance of missing important cues and raising accident risk. Notably, texting while driving harnesses habitual phone-checking behavior, making it a challenging distraction to overcome.
Step-by-step explanation:
Cognitive distractions cause the driver to take his/her mind off the road. These involve situations where the driver's focus is removed from the task of driving because of mental activities not related to driving, such as thinking about personal problems, daydreaming, or becoming absorbed in a conversation, either with passengers or on a mobile phone. Monitoring the road and navigation becomes secondary, leading to a reduced awareness of the driving environment and an increased risk of accidents. One particular form of cognitive distraction is texting while driving, which has become a concerning epidemic due to the habitual nature of phone use. Engaging with a mobile phone while driving taps into our 'event schema' for checking phones, making it difficult to resist even when it is known to be dangerous. Like the unforeseen red cross in inattentional blindness experiments, vital signals and changes on the road may go unnoticed, putting the driver and others at risk.
Additionally, consistent with findings on the effects of being observed, such as when a driver knows a police car is following, behaviors can become more controlled and deliberate. Distractions disrupt this control, shifting behavior from safety-oriented to potentially hazardous. Attention is a limited resource, and spreading it too thinly over multiple tasks, like driving and using a phone, leaves less available for safely operating a vehicle.