Is Your Phone Distracting You, Even If You’re Not Using It? How Do Notifications and Merely Having a Phone Nearby Affect How Well We Focus and Remember Things?

Abstract

This review examines whether a cell phone can negatively impact an individual’s ability to pay attention and recall information while the person is not actively using the device. Ward et al. (2017) indicated that simply having one’s own cell phone present resulted in less available working memory, with the greatest negative effects being among individuals who depend heavily upon their phones. Additionally, Thornton et al. (2014) discovered similar decreases in performance on challenging attention-demanding tasks. However, Ruiz Pardo and Minda (2022), in a pre-registered direct replication, and Hartmann et al. (2020), in a pre-registered conceptual replication, both failed to find a significant overall effect of phone presence. The results of the meta-analyses were also mixed. Some found evidence of effects on memory, while another found no significant overall effect of phone presence. Beyond the mere presence of a cell phone, receiving notifications has been shown to impair sustained attention (Stothart et al., 2015), and frequent media multitaskers showed poorer filtering abilities when dealing with extraneous information in Ophir et al.’s (2009) study. Overall, the evidence supporting a memory cost from phone presence remains limited and disputed.