
Your Phone is Distracting You More Than You Realize
By Movieguide® Contributor
It’s not enough to simply not use your phone — a study has found that even just the presence of a smartphone in the room can disrupt your focus.
A 2020 study from Malaysia’s Sunway University psychology department discovered that “the presence of smartphones (placed next to the individual face-down) is enough to disrupt their performance in a learning and memory task,” per Business Today.
“Our results showed that those without smartphones had higher recall accuracy compared to those with smartphones,” Associate Professor Dr Yong Min Hooi explained. “Further, there was a significant negative relationship between phone-conscious thought i.e. ‘how often did you think about your phone,’ and memory recall.”
She continued, “Phone conscious thought significantly predicted memory accuracy. We found that the presence of a smartphone and high phone-conscious thought affects one’s memory learning and recall, indicating the negative effect of a smartphone’s proximity to our learning and memory.”
The University of Texas at Austin conducted a similar study, with similar results.
“The researchers found that participants with their phones in another room significantly outperformed those with their phones on the desk, and they also slightly outperformed those participants who had kept their phones in a pocket or bag,” UT News wrote. “The findings suggest that the mere presence of one’s smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity and impairs cognitive functioning, even though people feel they’re giving their full attention and focus to the task at hand.”
Adrian Ward, the study’s co-author and an assistant professor at UT Austin, told Safety and Health Magazine, “We see a linear trend that suggests that as a smartphone becomes more noticeable, participants’ available cognitive capacity decreases.”
Movieguide® previously reported on the effect the absence of smartphones is having on high schoolers:
Students and faculty in Iowa’s Ottumwa Community are praising their school district’s decision to ban cell phones.
“In about mid-June, we began to think and realize that our district was going to be cell phone free K-9 because it had already been determined that our elementaries were, Liberty was and Evans Junior High had piloted it in the spring and it went super well,” Ottumwa High School Principal Shelley Bramchreiber told the Ottumwa Post.
She continued, “So the question came to us: what if we did a district wide ban? We began a gathering committee with students, community members, staff members, administrators, central office staff and board members. We tried to gather stakeholders from every realm to be part of this committee to see what it would look like in our schools.”
The high school now requires students to lock their phones in a cabinet while on campus during school hours, and the kids are already feeling the benefits of the new policy.
“I think my attention has kind of skyrocketed if that’s the word,” high school senior Madison Shoop told Breitbart. “I was more focused on, like, my phone, and, ‘Oh, my gosh, is that going to go off?’”
Shoop continued, “I just think I was so addicted to it that it was hard for me to look away personally, for me to look away like I would just be scrolling and scrolling and scrolling scrolling. At points in time when my mom talked to me, like, I couldn’t hear because I had my headphones in, I was scrolling through my phone, and I wasn’t paying attention.”