Abstract
The pervasive use of cell phones impacts many people–both cell phone users and bystanders exposed to conversations. This study examined the effects of overhearing a one-sided (cell phone) conversation versus a two-sided conversation on attention and memory. In our realistic design, participants were led to believe they were participating in a study examining the relationship between anagrams and reading comprehension. While the participant was completing an anagram task, the researcher left the room and participants overheard a scripted conversation, either two confederates talking with each other or one confederate talking on a cell phone. Upon the researcher’s return, the participant took a recognition memory task with words from the conversation, and completed a questionnaire measuring the distracting nature of the conversation. Participants who overheard the one-sided conversation rated the conversation as significantly higher in distractibility than those who overheard the two-sided conversation. Also, participants in the one-sided condition scored higher on the recognition task. In particular they were more confident and accurate in their responses to words from the conversation than participants in the two-sided condition. However, participants’ scores on the anagram task were not significantly different between conditions. As in real world situations, individual participants could pay varying amounts of attention to the conversation since they were not explicitly instructed to ignore it. Even though the conversation was irrelevant to the anagram task and contained less words and noise, one-sided conversations still impacted participants’ self-reported distractibility and memory, thus showing people are more attentive to cell phone conversations than two-sided conversations. Cell phone conversations may be a common source of distraction causing negative consequences in workplace environments and other public places.
Highlights
People spent an estimated 2.30 trillion minutes using their wireless devices over the last year [1]
Participants answered the following three questions to determine if they knew the purpose of the study: ‘‘What do you think the purpose of this study is?’’, ‘‘Do you have any questions about this study?’’ and ‘‘Do you think there is any other purpose to the study? If yes, please describe fully.’’
We hypothesized that the self-report questionnaire, anagram task, and recognition task would reveal that participants who overheard the one-sided conversation would be more distracted than participants who overheard the two-sided conversation
Summary
People spent an estimated 2.30 trillion minutes using their wireless devices over the last year [1]. One subset of these devices, are relied upon heavily for personal communication, and are often used in public spaces [2]. Cell phones are increasingly replacing land lines and participants described experiencing ‘‘a personal connection towards their cell phone’’ [3]. People have reported feeling so emotionally attached to their cell phones that they feel anxiety without their phones [4] or feel they ‘‘can’t live without’’ them [5]. With more technological capabilities, such as personal organizers and navigation devices, people see the cell phone as an essential part of their everyday lives and even feel that they have a ‘‘personal relationship’’ with their phones [6]. With the increased presence and personal use of cell phones, there is a greater likelihood that an individual will be frequently impacted by cell phones because either they or someone around them is using a cell phone
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