Paying attention? An experiment of cognition and creative potential under the mere presence of a smartphone
Paying attention? An experiment of cognition and creative potential under the mere presence of a smartphone

Summary/Abstract: While smartphones enhance communication and productivity, they may negatively affect mental health and cognitive performance. They can be distractive where the risk can have substantial consequences (e.g., in traffic, while working). Even when not in use, smartphones can be distracting and reduce cognitive capacity. This mere presence of smartphones has been described as having an adverse impact on social interaction and cognitive performance. Since creativity is also an increasingly important skill for finding new and useful ideas, the impact of mere presence on creative thinking should be investigated, as considerable evidence is missing. Objectives: The first goal of this study is to replicate the reduction effect of the mere presence of one's smartphone on cognitive capacity and test the effect of the dependency relationship on this hypothesized reduction. The second goal is to investigate this effect on divergent thinking. Methods: A between-subject experiment was carried out with two groups. One group was instructed to leave their phones with their other belongings at the front of the testing room (no phone group) while the second group could keep their phones with them and were instructed to place them on the desk with the screen down, volume and vibrations off. Both groups were tested with tests of attention, fluid intelligence, two divergent thinking tasks (verbal and figural), and the Smartphone Addiction Scale. The data from 47 participants were used to test the hypotheses. Results: The study did not find an effect of mere presence on attention. The groups differed in the expected direction, but the difference was not statistically significant, p =.592, Vargha and Delaney's A12 = .52. There was also not a significant effect for fluid intelligence with p = .834, A12 = .41. For divergent thinking, Principal Component Analysis was used to generate verbal and figural scores. We did not find a significant reduction in these two scores, verbal p = .926 with A12 = 0.32, figural p = .069, A12 = .55. There was no support for a moderation effect of smartphone dependency. Discussion and conclusion: Our data do not support the mere presence effect and its negative impact on cognition or divergent thinking. We have considered the differences in the location and ownership of the phone. It can be suggested that having one's own smartphone in the field of vision but knowing it is turned off is not as distracting as having an unknown smartphone where one cannot be sure if it is on or off. Another reason is the small sample size, which affects the possibility of detecting small effects. We propose the potential detectability of these effects in larger samples and advocate for continued research on technology's impact on cognition and creativity.

• Details
• Contents