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closeInformative controls
Posted by philipm on 23 Jan 2014 at 01:25 GMT
The authors use unrestricted walking as the control in this paper.
I wonder if an appropriate control would be for the participants to hold an object (their phone turned off perhaps) in the same position as they would if they were using their mobile phones. Such a control would separate posture effects of the physical location of the phone from the cognitive effects of phone use on gait.
RE: Informative controls
sschabrun replied to philipm on 23 Jan 2014 at 22:27 GMT
We agree that this would be a useful addition that would help to separate the effects of the physical location on posture and the effects of cognition on phone use during gait, particularly given our findings of similar effects when reading text on a mobile phone, to typing text. This is certainly something that future studies should explore to further disentangle why gait is altered during mobile phone use and walking.