Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

From distracted driving, to work focus on a computer,increasing amounts of research is investigating how digitaltechnology influences users’ attention. A couple of widelycited studies have found that the mere presence of cell phonesinterferes with social interactions and cognitive performance,even when not actively in use. These studies have importantimplications but they have not yet been replicated, and alsosuffer from methodological shortcomings and lack ofestablished theoretical frameworks to explain the observedeffects. We improved the methodology used in a previousstudy of phone presence and task performance (Thornton,Faires, Robbins, & Rollins, 2014), while testing an‘opportunity cost’ model of mental effort and attention(Kurzban, Duckworth, Kable, & Myers, 2013). We wereunable to replicate Thornton et al.’s finding that presence ofcell phones reduces performance in a specific cognitive task(additive digit cancellation). Moreover, contrary to ourexpectations, we found that participants who used theirphones more, and who were more attached to them, found thetasks more fun/exciting and effortless, if they completed themwith their phone present.