“In today’s digital age, diverting attention away from the screen is a challenge, but one needed to ensure safety when walking,” says Churchill spokesperson Ewan Robertson. “That’s why we’ve launched our “Screen down, Eyes Up” campaign to help spark discussions among students and schools, to promote greater road safety awareness.”
As part of the Screen Down, Eyes Up campaign, Churchill worked with psychologist Dr Jessamy Hibberd to suggest ways in which local authorities could reimagine roads and signage to grab the attention of young people.
“Younger secondary school children do not combine different sensory information, such as vision and sound, to make sense of the world as adults do,” says Hibberd. “Secondary school children are also more impulsive and do not process risk in the same way as adults, which means that signage directed at them around schools needs to be more noticeable and ‘direct’ to grab attention away from their phones.”
She has also come up with a range of recommendations for local authorities who might wish to consider modifying road architecture to help distract students away from their phones. They include the use of new attention alerts such as ‘eyes emojis’, and clever use of arrows, as well as brightly coloured signage, auditory alerts and signs on the way towards crossings and on the ground when children reach them.
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