Infants Recognize the Negative Impact of Phone Distraction on Performance
Name
Infancy - 2025 - Cao - Infants Recognize the Negative Impact of Phone Distraction on Performance.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
999.8 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
d598cc8f59e2779ec214d43376c005e9
Author(s)
Cao, Qiong
Mears, Anna
Feigenson, Lisa
Date Issued
March 21, 2025
Journal
Infancy
Publisher
Wiley
Citation
Cao, Q., Mears, A. and Feigenson, L. (2025), Infants Recognize the Negative Impact of Phone Distraction on Performance. Infancy, 30: e70015.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Seeing adults use cellphones is a common daily experience for infants, yet little is known about how infants think about others’cellphone use. Do infants recognize that phone usage can affect the user’s behavior? Here we asked whether infants expect aperson’s task performance to be impaired by phone use. Twenty‐month‐old infants watched adults building block towers. Oneadult did this while also using a phone, either looking at the screen and scrolling (Experiment 1; N = 24) or simply talking(Experiment 2; N = 24). Across both experiments, infants looked longer when the person who had been using the phone built ataller tower than the person who had not been using the phone, compared to the reverse. This suggests that infants expectedphone usage to negatively impact performance. Thus, early in development, children recognize that cell phone use can affectpeople's goal‐directed actions; this may be one example of a broader understanding of the impact of multitasking onperformance.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.70015
