Abstract
Previous research has shown that talking on a mobile phone leads to impairments in a number of cognitive tasks. However, it is not yet known whether the act of conversation disrupts the underlying cognitive mechanisms (the Cognitive Disruption hypothesis) or leads to a delay in response due to a limit on central cognitive resources (the Cognitive Delay hypothesis). We investigated this here using two cognitive search tasks that investigate spatial learning and time-based selection: Contextual Cueing and Visual Marking. In Contextual Cueing, responses to repeated displays are faster than those to novel displays. In Visual Marking, participants prioritize attention to new information and deprioritize old, unimportant information (the Preview Benefit). Experiments 1 to 3 investigated whether Contextual Cueing occurred while people were engaged in a phone conversation, whereas Experiments 4 to 6 investigated whether a Preview Benefit occurred, again while people were engaged in conversation. The results showed that having a conversation did not interfere with the mechanisms underlying spatial learning or time-based selection. However, in all experiments there was a significant increase in response times. The results are consistent with a Cognitive Delay account explaining the dual-task cost of having a phone conversation on concurrent cognitive tasks. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
Highlights
The ability to attend to our environment and search through it efficiently is key in helping us to interpret and interact with the world around us
The findings showed that the spatial learning that had occurred in the Training Phase could be expressed, without detriment, whilst participants were maintaining a conversation
Similar to the results of Experiment 1, this goes against the Cognitive Disruption account which predicts a reduction of the Contextual Cueing (CC) Effect in the Conversation condition
Summary
The ability to attend to our environment and search through it efficiently is key in helping us to interpret and interact with the world around us. Our attention is limited, leading to dual-task deficits and task switching costs if we have to use more cognitive resources than are available in order to complete our goals (e.g., Rogers & Monsell, 1995; Monsell, 2003, Kahneman, 1973). One clear example of this is the dual-task cost observed as a result of talking on a mobile phone (Strayer & Johnston, 2001) whilst trying to perform other important cognitive tasks (such as driving or paying attention to the world around us). Does having a phone conversation lead to deficits in tasks like driving but it can lead to impairments in other real-world tasks such as pedestrian situational awareness Given that mobile phone use is ubiquitous in many everyday situations it is important to understand how having a phone conversation interferes with concurrent tasks that we might be engaged with
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
