Imagine the work done in your brain as a well-functioning office: you have a CEO, observing every action of the department: the visual department dealing with the input from the eyes, a language department, dealing with - well, language; and also a storage department. These departments have been subject to a lot of research, with key studies ranging back to the 1960s. Some interesting findings are for example the Magic Number 7 (plus/minus 2), the maximum amount of information capable of being held in „short term memory“. (glossary)
But what if you got told, that a new person snuck in, someone messing up the workflow? This person is a friend of everyone, and also a big distractor - your phone.
In 2017, a research group led by Adrian Ward investigated something we kind of all take for granted: we are more likely to be distracted when our phones are out. But how would you go ahead to measure something like that?
As psychologists being a funny bunch, they came up with a combination of different task to achieve stable results. One consisted of a multi-tasking test: the OSpan task (Glossary). A second task, with the memorable name Ravens Standard Progressive Matrices, deals with the ability to complete patterns (Figure A1). Sounds like an easy task but the patterns are finely tuned to different levels of ability. And if this wasn’t enough, a third task, called the Go/No-Go task, was also included. Here participants had to respond to „Go stimuli“ as quickly as possible while refraining from responding to „No Go targets“. Pretty easy. But it goes on for a while… Perfect for measuring how long you can sustain your attention.
The most intriguing part of this study are the so-called „independent variables“. (glossary) Participants were randomly placed in different groups: Ward and his colleagues termed this Smartphone salience. Some had to leave their phone in a different room, other got told to have their phone where they „naturally“ would (in their pockets, bags or jackets), and the third group had to have their phones on the table. You might see where this going at…
The authors took all these measures, the OSpan, Ravens Standard Progressive Matrices and Go/No-Go task into one variable and called it Cognitive Capacity. A lot of experimental psychology jargon, sorry. Simply put, it is a combined measure of how much you can keep in your mind and how able you are to work with this information in a given instance.
Their finding: the measure of cognitive capacity is consistently different between the three experimental groups (phone location: table, bag/pocket, other room). I will say that again:
Smartphone salience alters your ability to solve problems.
… but not in a good way.
And it gets even better. In a second experiment, they changed one simple thing. While keeping everything else consistent, they altered the following: now the participants had to turn their phones completely off. … And the results did not change.
A translation of this would go something along these lines: Although you might think, that an inactive, turned-off phone leaves you without distraction: well, I'm sorry, it does. Your performance on those tasks gets progressively better the further away you are from your phone - and it doesn't even matter if your phone is turned on or not.
All of this sounds rather dooming.
Ward and his colleagues also investigated the emotional side of this effect. After having the participants fill out different questionnaires and looking into their responses coupled with the results of the other tasks and conditions, they concluded:
„Although we are cautious about making strong claims based on null effects and reiterate that the factors were derived from an exploratory inventory, this disparity between Smartphone Dependence and Emotional Attachment suggests that the effects of smartphone salience on available cognitive capacity may be determined by the extent to which consumers feel they need their phones, as opposed to how much they like them. These results are consistent with the proposition that the effects of smartphone salience on available cognitive capacity stem from the singularly important role these devices play in many consumer’s lives.“
Okay, amigo, let us rephrase that. The research team knew they were up to something. But phrasing their findings as „the more dependent you are on your phone, the dumber the mere presence of it makes you“, is not scientific - and also not nice. That's probably why they came up with their title: „Brain Drain“.
It is not only where your phone is physically, but also how important it is to you: That's how the participants mainly differed from each other.
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