Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.1186/s41235-025-00684-9

Publication Title

Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications

Volume

10

Issue

1

Pages

72 (1-12)

Abstract

Cognitive effects of cellphone dependency among young adults have garnered increasing research attention. While cellphones have been identified as a distractor in daily tasks, related psychological processes remain unclear. As a potential mechanism underlying those effects of cellphones, excessive working memory (WM) load has not yet been well examined. Our study investigated the effects of the mental representation of cellphone separation on WM. Seventy-five participants (M(age) = 21.3 years; 55 females, 20 males) were assigned into three groups: the cued separation, natural separation, or control group, and completed a block of choice reaction time (CRT) task, and a dual-task block: the CRT and a concurrent WM task. CRT performance was analyzed using the ex-Gaussian model, providing the parameters μ and τ to reflect lower-order processing and top-down control, respectively. Results showed that WM load reduced cognitive performance, with the cued separation group exhibiting the largest performance impairments, and ex-Gaussian μ and τ were sensitive to WM load and cellphone separation. Our findings suggest that the mental representation of cellphone separation, especially when cued, depletes cognitive resources, and impairs executive functions, which highlight the need for strategies to mitigate the cognitive costs of cellphone dependency, particularly in high-stakes applied contexts.

Rights

© The Authors 2025.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original authors and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Data Availability

Article states: "The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors on request."

Original Publication Citation

Gazzanigo, M., Quesnel, A., Roldan, C., & Yang, X. (2025). Cellphone separation modulates the effects of working memory load on ex-Gaussian parameters of choice reaction time. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 10(1), 1-12, Article 72. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-025-00684-9

ORCID

0009-0002-9311-9766 (Gazzanigo), 0009-0007-1378-6849 (Quesnel),

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