Is smartphone usage negatively associated with our ability to sustain attention?

The widespread use of smartphones in daily life has led to concerns about their impact on our attention span and ability to focus. Despite these concerns, relatively few studies have attempted to address whether smartphone usage is negatively associated with our ability to sustain attention. The current study aimed to establish whether higher smartphone usage is linked to impaired performance on a demanding sustained attention task where participants were required to continuously monitor a checkerboard stimulus for intermittent changes in stimulus contrast. Sixty-nine participants completed this contrast-change detection task and were subsequently split into low, moderate and high smartphone usage groups based on their mobile phone usage data from the week prior to the study. Comparing performance on the task between the three groups showed that there were no significant differences in terms of the number of targets detected or mean response time. However, the high smartphone usage group exhibited significantly higher variability in their reaction times, indicating less stable attention, as well as lower perceptual sensitivity (d-prime) compared to the low smartphone usage group. These findings suggest that excessive smartphone usage may have nuanced effects on our ability to sustain attention that are not immediately apparent in standard behavioural assays, such as hit rate and mean reaction time. However, further investigation is required to determine the causal relationship between smartphone usage and our capacity to sustain attention, as well as how these behavioural effects are modulated through active vs passive smartphone usage.