bushidopirate t1_j8qa5dp wrote
Reply to comment by hookhandsmcgee in Smartphone checking predicts more daily cognitive failures, study finds by chrisdh79
Why not both? It could be a feedback loop where people with attention issues are more likely to check their phones frequently, which further exacerbates their attention issues.
Using your horse-and-cart analogy, I wouldn’t be surprised if the horse initially pulls the cart, but then the cart plummets downhill and starts dragging the horse.
RiotShields t1_j8qec2k wrote
The issue here is that if the study only proved correlation, they failed to determine whether the claim they were investigating was true:
> It has been suggested that smartphone use may have negative effects on our cognitive processes
Therefore their interpretation of the results is totally unsupported:
> This suggests that smartphone excessive smartphone checking is a distracting behaviour [sic]
The article says they compared the same individuals across multiple days, but that doesn't investigate whether smartphone use causes distraction or pre-existing distraction causes smartphone use. That's the concern in the original comment.
Also they had a "sample of 181 iPhone users from a local university" which may not be representative of any other demographic.
So while the results may be interesting, we're still far from answering many of the questions we're asking, and we can't yet act positively on this information.
hotdiggydog t1_j8uxxr1 wrote
Well, I can say, as someone that doesn't have ADD or ADHD, that the moment i pick up my phone, I've forgotten what I was going to do.
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