6/25/2023 0 Comments View by multiple tags thebrainParry: I think the important difference here with this meta-analysis, compared to the Ward 2017 paper, is the magnitude of the effect. ![]() Love: Though it is similar to what Ward found, Parry’s analysis also revealed the impact on working memory was much smaller than initial studies indicated. So they found a negative effect for working memory, but they didn’t find a negative effect for sustained attention. And that is somewhat consistent with Ward and colleagues. Parry: Whereas for the other four cognitive functions, no statistically significant effects of the presence of a smartphone were found across the various effects included in those analyses. Parry: So looking at the five separate analyses–of the five, the only statistically significant result was for working memory. In the end, he looked at 56 effect sizes on how phones affect our minds from 27 studies in 25 publications. ![]() Parry lumped together data for each of these functions individually and then did a sixth analysis where he looked at all the results together. Love: Past studies on brain drain looked primarily at five cognitive functions: working memory, sustained attention, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility and fluid intelligence. Parry: I saw that there’s a need to kind of bring together the sort of 20 to 30 studies that have been conducted over the last-it’s about seven or eight years-on this phenomenon and see across the studies “What do we actually know about the so-called brain drain hypothesis?” and, that is, “It’s a meaningful effect? Is it a consistent effect?” Love: Parry’s work on online vigilance led him to wonder how strong brain drain’s effects really are. We’re thinking, we’re ruminating about, you know, the news cycle, the-our friends and family that we can connect to through our-through our phone, and so on. Parry: …which is essentially this idea that we’re constantly aware of the online world, the mobile world around us. Parry became interested in brain drain first from studying multitasking and then from investigating something called “online vigilance…” Love: That’s Doug Parry, a lecturer at Stellenbosch University, who studies socioinformatics and who did the meta-analysis-a study in which data from multiple published papers are combined together and reanalyzed. But in a new meta-analysis that looked at data from 27 different brain drain studies, the story of the brain drain hypothesis has gotten a little more complicated.ĭoug Parry: If it’s just sitting next to you while you’re working, is that a problem or not? And I think that’s quite an important question to answer, to know more about. Love: This was an intriguing, though slightly concerning, finding that triggered more studies on how the presence of our smartphones might be influencing how well we’re able to think. Ward: Even when you’re not consciously thinking about your phone, the process of not thinking about your phone requires some cognitive resources. The farther away a person’s phone was, the better they did on those tasks. Love: In those experiments, people either had their phones on a desk, in their pockets or bags, or in the next room. And the idea there is that those are two very different cognitive skills, word memory and math problems, but they’re tapping into that same general cognitive resource. ![]() Ward: The way we measure it is by having people remember words and solve math problems at the same time. But have I really protected myself from its distractions or its ability to impact my mind? The answer is no, according to a well-known study in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research from 2017 entitled “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.”Ĭognitive and social psychologist Adrian Ward and his colleagues proposed the “brain drain hypothesis” by showing that just having a phone next to you could impact cognition-specifically, working memory, or the mental system that helps us hold information about what we’re currently doing at a given moment. Right now my phone is sitting next to me untouched. In frustration, you might slam the phone down beside you and swear to leave it alone-theoretically allowing you to focus on what you’re doing. ![]() You’re trying to get some work done, and you find yourself continually picking up your cell phone. Shayla Love: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science.
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