Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity

By Adrian F. Ward, Kristen E. Duke, Ayelet Gneezy, Maarten W. Bos. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2017

653 citations recorded by the source corpus.

How researchers see this paper

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Citizens Versus the Internet: Confronting Digital Challenges With Cognitive Tools (2019, background): “Even the mere presence of a smartphone can occupy attentional resources and reduce cognitive ability (Ward et al., 2017), and smartphone notifications disrupt performance on attention-demanding tasks even when people are not actively attending to their phone, arguably because of mind wandering (Stot”
The Smartphone as a Pacifying Technology (2020, positive): “Relatedly, in one of the only studies of smartphone use in consumer research, Ward et al. (2017) found that participants restricted from their smartphones experienced cognitive load and consequently demonstrated impaired performance on a cognitive task.”
Addictive Features of Social Media/Messenger Platforms and Freemium Games against the Background of Psychological and Economic Theories (2019, background): “Another research group stresses that the availability of smartphones even might lead to “brain drain”, when the device is present on the desk while working on a fluid intelligence task or working memory task [11].”