The Relation Between Smartphone Use and Everyday Inattention

Abstract

In two studies, we explored the relation between subjective reports of smartphone use and eve-ryday inattention. We created two questionnaires that measured general smartphone use (i.e. how frequently people send and receive texts, use social media, etc), and absent-minded smartphone use (i.e. how frequently people use their phone without a purpose in mind). In addition, partici-pants completed four scales assessing everyday attention lapses, attention-related errors, sponta-neous mind wandering and deliberate mind wandering, which were included in order to measure everyday inattention. The results of both studies revealed a strong positive relation between gen-eral and absent-minded smartphone use. Furthermore, we observed significant positive relations between each of the smartphone use questionnaires and each of the four measures of inattention. However, a series of regression analyses demonstrated that when both types of smartphone use were used as simultaneous predictors of inattention, the relation between inattention and smartphone use was driven entirely by absent-minded use. Specifically, absent-minded smartphone use consistently had a unique positive relation with the inattention measures, while general smartphone use either had no relation (Study 1) or a unique negative relation (Study 2) with inattention.