ArticlePDF Available

Infants Recognize the Negative Impact of Phone Distraction on Performance

Authors:

Abstract and Figures

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 a person’s task performance to be impaired by phone use. Twenty‐month‐old infants watched adults building block towers. One adult 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 a taller tower than the person who had not been using the phone, compared to the reverse. This suggests that infants expected phone usage to negatively impact performance. Thus, early in development, children recognize that cell phone use can affect people's goal‐directed actions; this may be one example of a broader understanding of the impact of multitasking on performance.
Content may be subject to copyright.
Infancy
-
RESEARCH ARTICLE
OPEN ACCESS
Infants Recognize the Negative Impact of Phone
Distraction on Performance
Qiong Cao
1,2
| Anna Mears
1
| Lisa Feigenson
1
1
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA |
2
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
Correspondence: Qiong Cao (qcao14@jhu.edu)
Received: 3 May 2024 | Revised: 23 February 2025 | Accepted: 7 March 2025
Funding: The authors received no specic funding for this work.
Keywords: competence | distraction | performance | phones
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 a
person’s task performance to be impaired by phone use. Twenty‐month‐old infants watched adults building block towers. One
adult 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 a
taller tower than the person who had not been using the phone, compared to the reverse. This suggests that infants expected
phone usage to negatively impact performance. Thus, early in development, children recognize that cell phone use can affect
people's goal‐directed actions; this may be one example of a broader understanding of the impact of multitasking on
performance.
1
|
Introduction
Distraction is a common presence in modern life; throughout
our days, screens, sounds, and the presence of other people
often divert our attention from our immediate goals. In the
modern world, digital devices are a leading source of such
distraction. Roughly 97% of Americans own a cellphone (Pew
Research Center 2021), and many people report averaging up to
3 hours of phone use daily (Horwood et al. 2021). This devotion
to our phones has been shown to affect various aspects of
experience, including academic performance, driving attentive-
ness, and social relationships (Drews et al. 2008; Kates
et al. 2018; Roberts and David 2016). Digital distraction and
media multitasking in general have been shown to pose nega-
tive impacts on cognition, learning, academic performance,
health, and interpersonal relationships (Aagaard 2019; Carrier
et al. 2015; Kostić and Ranđelović 2022; Zamanzadeh and
Rice 2021).
Given the importance of social connections and social learning
in early development, investigating young children’s experience
of cellphones is pressing. Evidence suggests that parents engage
in signicant phone usage while with their children, including
during mealtimes, bedtime, and playtime (Lemish et al. 2020;
McDaniel and Coyne 2016; Radesky et al. 2014). For instance,
research reports that 73% of parents used mobile devices when
dining at fast food restaurants with their children (Radesky
et al. 2014). Naturalistic observational studies found that nearly
80% of parents used their mobile devices while at playgrounds
with their children (Lemish et al. 2020; Mangan et al. 2018), and
76% of parents reported that their children had exposure to
mobile devices including phones (Kılıç et al. 2019). In one study,
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work
is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modications or adaptations are made.
© 2025 The Author(s). Infancy published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of International Congress of Infant Studies.
Infancy, 2025; 30:e70015 1 of 8
https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.70015
which used an objective mobile sensing application to track
parental phone use, parents were found to spend an average of
27% of their time with children on their smartphones (McDaniel
et al. 2023). This phone usage affects parent‐child interactions
(Kildare and Middlemiss 2017). Research in naturalistic settings
nds that caregivers pay reduced attention to children’s
emotional distress and risky behaviors when engaging with
their phones (Elias et al. 2021; Lemish et al. 2020). Laboratory
studies yield similar ndings: parents showed decreased scaf-
folding and responsiveness to infants as the number of phone
notications they received increased (Corkin et al. 2021), and
mother‐infant dyads exhibited reduced joint attention when
their interactions were interrupted by phones (Krapf‐Bar
et al. 2022). Infants in a modied still‐face paradigm exhibited
less positive affect and more negative affect when the adult with
whom they had been interacting suddenly redirected their
attention to their cell phone (Myruski et al. 2018; Stockdale
et al. 2020).
This research suggests that cellphone distraction can negatively
impact caregivers’ interactions with children. But do very
young children themselves recognize this potential for
distraction? Given the large amount of experience infants have
seeing adults interacting with phones, it is possible that even
before having rst‐hand experience using phones themselves,
infants already understand that phones are linked to distracted
behaviors and can change the way users interact with the
world. Although no research yet bears on this question, evi-
dence shows that infants are sensitive to aspects of adults’
goal‐directed actions and differentiate better from worse per-
formance; for example, infants prefer to look at and imitate
the actions of a highly competent person over a less
competent person (Lee and Rutherford 2018; Stenberg 2013).
Importantly, people’s competence isn’t always reected in their
performance—temporary situational factors can affect the
outcomes of their efforts. Adults recognize that situational
factors may enhance or detract from task performance—a
straight‐A student can fail an exam if sleep‐deprived; a good
driver might swerve off the road if distracted by a phone call.
This understanding is important for selecting sources of social
learning—it may be best to learn from an expert over a non‐
expert, but in order to judge expertise, one must localize the
source of a person’s success or failure. Do very young learners
also understand that temporary constraints can affect the
quality of task performance? Although infants may experience
a variety of situations in which another person’s temporary
state causes them to be distracted and therefore less engaged
with other tasks (such as when an adult watches television, or
carries on an in‐person conversation), the ndings reviewed
above suggest that infants also experience a great deal of phone
use by the adults around them. Therefore, here we investigated
infants’ understanding of the distraction caused by multi-
tasking, using phone use as our case study.
In two experiments, we tested infants’ understanding of how
phone use impacts the performance of adults engaged in a
simple manual task. Specically, we asked whether infants
expect that a person engaged in a block‐stacking task while
using their phone will produce a poorer outcome, relative to a
person not using a phone. In Experiment 1, infants saw the
phone user scrolling; in Experiment 2, infants saw the phone
user merely talking. Both experiments relied on a violation‐of‐
expectation paradigm in which we compared infants’ looking
at expected outcomes (in which the phone user exhibited
worse task performance) to looking at unexpected outcomes (in
which the phone user exhibited better task performance). We
targeted infants who were roughly one‐and‐a‐half years of age,
because previous work has found that infants’ own experience
manipulating small objects—and in particular, stacking blocks
—is emerging during this time (Marcinowski et al. 2019).
Having some prior experience engaging in these kinds of
object‐directed behaviors increased the possibility that infants
might recognize that phone distraction could plausibly affect
performance.
2
|
Experiment 1
2.1
|
Method
Twenty‐four 20‐month‐old full‐term infants participated (mean
age =19.95 months, SD =0.45 months, range =19.16–
20.72 months; 13 girls). Sample size was determined via a priori
power analysis using GPower, assuming a medium effect size
(f=0.39), with power 0.95 and an alpha of 0.05. Of the six infants
whose parents submitted demographic information, 5 were White
and one was of mixed race; the remaining parents declined to
report this information. Three additional infants were tested but
excluded from analysis due to fussiness. The experiments were
conducted in accord with APA standards for ethical treatments of
participants, and were conducted with approval from a university
Institutional Review Board. Parental consent was obtained prior
to the experiment, and families received an Amazon gift card as
compensation for their participation.
Infants were tested over Zoom by a live experimenter, with
sessions recorded for later coding (see Smith‐Flores et al. 2021,
for technical details). Infants participated from their homes,
seated either in a highchair or on a parent’s lap, and viewed the
stimuli on parents’ computers.
On each trial infants saw a video of two women sitting at a
table, each in front of a collection of 18 scattered blocks
(Figure 1). The women, matched in race and age, wore
different colored shirts to make them easily discriminable. At
the start of each trial, the women waved and said “We’re
going to build some towers!” Then, to draw infants’ attention
to the starting arrays of blocks, the video was paused and each
block was simultaneously highlighted by a white outline that
ashed for 6 s while the rest of the image was briey blurred.
Then a bell rang to signal the two women to start building,
and the video resumed. Infants saw the two women begin to
stack blocks atop each other; after approximately 3 s of
building, two occluding screens appeared, covering the blocks
and the women’s hands. The women’s upper body movements
remained visible, so that it was clear that their activity
continued behind the occluders.
After the occluders appeared, the phone of one of the women
made a salient notication sound, which caused her to pick it up
from her lap and look at it, holding it with her left hand. As she
2 of 8 Infancy, 2025
looked at it attentively, the phone continued to receive further
notications. Throughout this, the woman’s right arm
continued to move behind the occluder. Meanwhile, the other
woman kept building block towers attentively. After 10 s, both
women stopped building, simultaneously raised their hands and
said, in unison, “All done!”
On each test trial, infants saw the occluders simultaneously
lowered to reveal the towers each person had built. On Expected
Outcome trials, the woman who had been using her phone had
two short, 3‐block towers in front of her (and many scattered
blocks around the towers), whereas the woman who had not
used her phone had two tall, 9‐block towers in front of her. On
Unexpected Outcome trials, this pairing was reversed. Infants
had 50 s to look at these outcomes; the rst 6 s showed the
towers in front of each person highlighted with blinking white
outlines, followed by 44 s in which the highlighting disappeared
and the video frame was frozen. Because our test outcomes
contained images of people, we chose the length of this looking
window to be similar to those of other online studies that also
presented similar‐age infants with social stimuli (e.g., Margoni
and Thomsen 2024), and longer than the looking windows used
by online studies that presented non‐social stimuli (Gill and
Sommerville 2023; Smith‐Flores et al. 2021; Wang 2023).
Because infants often tend to look longer at social stimuli, this
longer looking window reduced the possibility that we would
fail to observe sufcient variability in looking times due to at‐
ceiling looking. Our measure of interest was infants’ cumula-
tive looking across the full 50‐s test window.
Infants saw six test trials alternating between Expected and
Unexpected Outcomes; which of these infants saw rst, and
which of the women was using her phone, were counter-
balanced across participants (the identity of the woman who
used her phone remained constant for each infant across trials).
Infants’ looking was coded ofine by an experienced observer;
50% of the videos were also independently coded by a second
observer (Intraclass Correlation Coefcient (ICC) =0.981).
2.2
|
Results
Data analysis was performed in R (R Core Team 2013).
Although infants were initially attentive, many lost interest in
the stimuli by the end of the testing session (potentially because
of our choice to use xed test‐trial windows rather than infant‐
controlled test windows). Whereas 95.8% and 75% of infants
completed the rst and second pair of test trials, respectively,
only 45.8% of infants completed the third pair. Because of the
large amount of missing data on the third trial pair, we excluded
this from analysis (consistent with other studies using online
testing, which included four or fewer test trials; Gill and Som-
merville 2023; Margoni and Thomsen 2024; Smith‐Flores
et al. 2021; Wang 2023).
We then examined infants’ looking times using a generalized
linear mixed‐effects model with outcome type (Expected, Un-
expected) as the xed effect and participant as the random
intercept effect, with trial number (1 through 4) as a covariate.
This analysis revealed that infants looked signicantly longer at
Unexpected Outcomes (Mean =38.69 s, SD =7.31 s) than Ex-
pected Outcomes (Mean =35.82 s, SD =9.17 s), β=3.30, 95%
CI =[0.94, 5.65], F(1, 56.34) =7.89, p=0.007, partial η
2
=0.12
(Figure 2). Including outcome type signicantly improved
model t relative to the model containing only the covariate
(likelihood ratio test χ
2
(1) =7.86, p=0.005). We also observed a
signicant effect of trial number
2
(3) =46.93, p<0.001),
whereby infants’ looking decreased across trials. The signicant
effect of outcome also was observed when we analyzed infants’
looking only during the 44 s of the test event after the ashing
highlighting of the blocks had ended (p=0.005).
FIGURE 1
|Experiment Procedure for Experiment 1. Top row (Familiarization): Infants saw two women sitting before equal numbers of blocks,
then saw them start to build block towers. After their progress was occluded, one of the women began looking at her phone. Bottom row (Test Trials):
Infants saw alternating test trials in which the woman who had been using her phone made shorter towers (Expected Outcome) or taller towers
(Unexpected Outcome).
3 of 8
2.3
|
Discussion
Infants looked signicantly longer when a person who was
distracted by her phone completed a task more successfully than
a non‐distracted person. What led to this expectation? Scrolling
on one’s cellphone could limit performance in multiple ways.
First, infants might recognize that scrolling redirects a person’s
visual input—the distracted woman in Experiment 1 was
looking mostly at her phone rather than at the blocks she was
manipulating. Hence, infants might expect that looking away
from a task leads to worse performance. Or, infants might
recognize that engaging with a phone requires attention, inde-
pendent of its effects on gaze (e.g., hands‐free phone conversa-
tions make drivers less vigilant; Treffner and Barrett 2004).
To nd out, we next asked whether infants expect that simply
talking on the phone impedes performance.
3
|
Experiment 2
3.1
|
Method
As in Experiment 1, 24 20‐month‐old full‐term infants partici-
pated (mean age =20.03 months, SD =0.34 months,
range =19.53–20.79 months; 14 girls). Of the 12 infants whose
parents submitted demographic information, ve were White,
two were Asian, one was Black or African American, and four
were of mixed race or other race. Parents of the remaining infants
declined to report this information. Eight additional infants were
tested but excluded from analysis due to fussiness (N=4), tech-
nical issues (N=2), or parental interference (N=2).
Infants watched videos similar to those in Experiment 1; how-
ever, rather than scrolling on her phone, one of the women
received a call and talked on the phone while she built block
towers. As in Experiment 1, infants rst saw two women sitting
before arrays of unconnected blocks, and then saw the two
women start building. After 3 s, two occluding screens appeared
and covered the builders’ progress; the women’s upper body
movements remained visible as they continued to build. Next, a
ringtone played, triggering one of the women to pick up her
phone and begin talking. She continued to build but could be
seen and heard quietly talking throughout most of the trial
(while the other person also continued building). After about
10 s, the woman talking on the phone said “Bye!” and put the
phone down. Both women then raised their hands and said “All
done!” The occluders were lowered simultaneously to reveal
either the Expected Outcome (in which two shorter towers were
in front of the person who had been talking on the phone, and
two tall towers were in front of the other person), or the Un-
expected Outcome (in which this pairing was reversed)
(Figure 3). The outcome remained visible for 50 s.
As in Experiment 1, infants saw six test trials alternating be-
tween Expected and Unexpected Outcomes, with order coun-
terbalanced across infants. We also counterbalanced which
person was talking on the phone (which remained constant for
each infant). Infants’ looking was coded ofine by an experi-
enced observer, and 50% of the videos were also coded by a
second observer (ICC =0.988).
3.2
|
Results
As in Experiment 1, the rate at which infants completed both
test trials within a pair declined steeply across the testing ses-
sion, from 100% to 87.5% and then to 58.3% across test pairs 1–3.
Therefore, as before, we excluded the last pair from analysis due
to the large number of missing trials. As in Experiment 1, we
ran a generalized linear mixed‐effects model with outcome type
(Expected, Unexpected) as the xed effect and participant as a
random intercept effect, and trial number (1 through 4) as a
covariate.
As in Experiment 1, we found that infants looked signicantly
longer at Unexpected Outcomes (Mean =40.64 s, SD =7.91 s)
than Expected Outcomes (Mean =38.16 s, SD =8.11 s),
β=2.60, 95% CI =[0.43, 4.77], F(1, 63.61) =5.73, p=0.020,
partial η
2
=0.08 (Figure 4). Including outcome type signicantly
improved model t relative to the model containing only the
covariate
2
(1) =5.83, p=0.016). Similar to Experiment 1, we
also found a signicant effect of trial number
2
(3) =42.40,
p<0.001). Finally, as in Experiment 1, infants also looked
longer at the unexpected outcome when we only considered the
44 s of stimulus presentation after the ashing highlighting of
the blocks had stopped (p=0.032).
3.3
|
General Discussion
Using a violation‐of‐expectation paradigm, we found that 20‐
month‐old infants expected a person who scrolled on her
phone (Experiment 1) or who simply talked on the phone
(Experiment 2) to exhibit worse performance on a tower‐
FIGURE 2
|Infants’ Average Looking Times in Experiment 1. Average
cumulative looking time across the 50‐s test window. Red dots depict
means of looking times; error bars indicate standard errors. Horizontal
lines indicate medians, boxes indicate middle quartiles, and whiskers
indicate data points within 1.5 times the interquartile range from the
upper and lower edges of the middle quartiles. Gray dots depict average
looking times from individual participants.
4 of 8 Infancy, 2025
building task, compared to someone not engaged with her
phone (or, conversely, expected someone who was not talking
on their phone to exhibit better performance). These results
suggest that from early in life, children may recognize that
phones can be one source of distraction.
Previous work found that infants exhibited more negative affect
when parents were on the phone than when they were not
(Elias et al. 2021; Myruski et al. 2018; Stockdale et al. 2020). This
negative affect may have reected infants’ frustration at their
failed attempts to regain parents’ attention during the session,
but it is also possible that infants already recognized the like-
lihood of decreased social engagement when they saw their
parents on the phone, especially given that most infants have
had ample opportunity to experience adults’ cellphone use. Our
results go beyond such ndings by demonstrating that even
when they themselves do not risk diminished social interactions
with a phone user, infants have expectations about how phone
use will impact the user.
What aspects of phone use led infants in our experiments to
expect worse performance? There are several possibilities, not
mutually exclusive. One is that infants understood that phone
use disrupts the user’s gaze, reducing their relevant visual input.
By 20 months, infants demonstrate sensitivity to the gaze of
others (Flavell 2004). For example, infants seek to identify what
object an adult is looking at when determining the referent of a
novel word (Baldwin and Moses 1994), and preschoolers
recognize that knowledge can be acquired by looking into a box
but not by touching it (Pillow 1989). Such ndings raise the
possibility that sensitivity to gaze led infants in Experiment 1 to
notice that one of the women engaged in tower‐building was
often looking at her phone, and thus conclude that she would
not be as successful at tower‐building. However, the results of
Experiment 2 show that visual attention was not the only factor
infants considered, because infants expected phone use to result
in poorer performance even when the phone user continued
looking at the towers as she was building them.
Another possibility is that infants were sensitive to the amount
of attention the women in our experiments paid to the task.
Some evidence that infants represent others’ attentional states
comes from studies of infant pointing. Liszkowski et al. (2007)
found that 12‐month olds showed more declarative pointing
when their social partner both looked at the correct referent
and exhibited a positive attitude (rather than being visibly
FIGURE 4
|Infants’ Average Looking Times in Experiment 2. Average
cumulative looking time across the 50‐s test window. Red dots depict
means of looking times; error bars indicate standard errors. Horizontal
lines indicate medians, boxes indicate middle quartiles, and whiskers
indicate data points within 1.5 times the interquartile range from the
upper and lower edges of the middle quartiles. Gray dots indicate
average looking times from individual participants.
FIGURE 3
|Experiment Procedure for Experiment 2. Top row (Familiarization): Infants saw two women sitting before equal numbers of blocks,
then saw them start to build block towers. After their progress was occluded, one of the women began looking at her phone. Bottom row (Test Trial):
Infants saw alternating test trials in which the woman who had been using her phone made shorter towers (Expected Outcome) or taller towers
(Unexpected Outcome).
5 of 8
uninterested). On the other hand, research using an explicit task
found that whereas 6‐ and 8‐year‐old children understand that
mentally focusing on one activity will result in little attention to
another activity, 4‐year‐olds evidenced no such recognition
(Flavell et al. 1995). Although recent work shows that 15‐
month‐old infants represent the amount of effort adults exert
in a task (Leonard et al. 2017), no extant work (of which we are
aware) directly addresses whether infants represent others’ de-
gree of attentional focus. Our ndings are consistent with such a
claim, although future work should continue to explore this.
One other cue that infants may have used to predict people’s
performance is people’s degree of manual constraint. In Ex-
periments 1 and 2, infants saw a person holding a phone with
one hand (using her thumb to scroll in Experiment 1 or holding
the phone and talking in Experiment 2). If infants recognized
that tower‐building is more easily accomplished with two hands
than one, this could have led them to anticipate shorter towers
being constructed by the phone user. Some evidence suggests
that infants can consider the degree to which an agent’s hands
are free when analyzing their actions (Gergely et al. 2002;
Luo 2010). Therefore, future work that separates an actor’s
manual engagement with a task from their attentional engage-
ment will help to reveal whether both or just one of these factors
determines infants’ expectations about performance outcomes.
However, at least one consideration leads us to favor the idea
that infants formed expectations on the basis of more than just
the number of hands used being used to accomplish the task. In
a separate study (Cao and Feigenson, submitted), we tested
preschoolers’ understanding of how temporary distractions,
including phone use, would affect agents’ task performance.
Children saw two people building block towers, with one of
them concurrently using a smartphone. Critically, in one con-
dition the non‐phone‐user and the phone‐user both used just
one hand to complete the task, so that their manual access was
matched. Children as young as 3 years old still expected worse
performance from the phone user. This at least raises the pos-
sibility that infants, too, might recognize the negative impact of
phone use above and beyond its effect on manual access.
Although here we focused on infants’ understanding of how
phone use can affect task performance, our ndings raise the
question of whether infants also understand the negative in-
uence of other types of activities, and whether infants' per-
formance we observed in our study reects a broader
understanding of the impact of distraction or multitasking. For
instance, when parents are typing on a laptop, cooking, or
watching TV, any concurrent goals they have may be less
quickly or successfully accomplished. Observing adults in these
kinds of situations may provide opportunities for infants to
experience the effects of multitasking on goal‐directed behavior.
Therefore, although here we found that infants are sensitive to
cell phone use as a form of distraction, we speculate that similar
sensitivity might emerge when infants observe other everyday
multitasking scenarios.
Our ndings also touch on the importance of distinguishing be-
tween competence and performance. Older children are sensitive
to this distinction—an ability that requires taking situational
factors into account. For instance, preschoolers and early school‐
age children consider both effort and competence when judging
people’s performance (Muradoglu and Cimpian 2020), and un-
derstand that temporary setbacks can mask an agent’s actual
competence (Yang and Frye 2016). While a full understanding of
the difference between competence and performance may not yet
be present in infancy, our present ndings suggest that infants do
consider situational factors when forming expectations about
others’ task performance. On the other hand, an alternative
interpretation of our results is that infants formed a more dispo-
sitional judgment of the phone user—one that extends beyond
any particular instance of their phone usage. If so, seeing a person
using a phone could lead infants to predict that the person will
perform more poorly in the future, even after their phone use has
ended. Such an interpretation cannot be ruled out by our current
data, although previous work in which caregivers temporarily
directed their attention away from infants and toward a cell phone
found that many of infants’ behaviors returned to baseline levels
after the phone use ended (Myruski et al. 2018; Stockdale
et al. 2020). For example, infants’ positive affect decreased during
maternal cell phone use, but then bounced back once mothers
stopped using their phones and reconnected with infants. This
suggests that, at least for more familiar adults than those in the
current study, an instance of temporary phone use does not lead
infants to make long‐term attributions. Although more work is
needed to fully explore this issue, we therefore favor the inter-
pretation that infants recognize that short‐term factors like phone
use can lead to distraction. If so, the ability to distinguish
competence from performance may have its roots in capacities
present early in life.
Author Contributions
Qiong Cao: conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, investi-
gation, methodology, project administration, resources, visualization,
writing original draft, writing review and editing. Anna Mears: data
curation, methodology, writing review and editing. Lisa Feigenson:
conceptualization, data curation, investigation, methodology, project
administration, resources, supervision, writing original draft, writing
review and editing.
Acknowledgments
We thank Joanna Zhou and Arianna Sforza for video coding, and Amber
Hu for stimuli preparation. Open Access funding enabled and organized
by MIT Hybrid 2025.
Ethics Statement
The study received approval from the Johns Hopkins University
Homewood Institutional Review Board (ID: HIRB00012224).
Conicts of Interest
The authors declare no conicts of interest.
Data Availability Statement
All study materials, raw data, and data analysis les are available at
OSF: https://osf.io/qdvmf/.
References
Aagaard, J. 2019. “Multitasking as Distraction: A Conceptual Analysis of
Media Multitasking Research.” Theory & Psychology 29, no. 1: 87–99.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354318815766.
6 of 8 Infancy, 2025
Baldwin, D. A., and L. J. Moses. 1994. “The Mindreading Engine: Evalu-
ating the Evidence for Modularity.” Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive/
Current Psychology of Cognition 13, no. 5: 553–560.
Cao, Q., and L. Feigenson. (submitted). “Early Reasoning About
Competence and Performance.”
Carrier, L. M., L. D. Rosen, N. A. Cheever, and A. F. Lim. 2015. “Causes,
Effects, and Practicalities of Everyday Multitasking.” Developmental
Review 35: 64–78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2014.12.005.
Corkin, M. T., A. M. E. Henderson, E. R. Peterson, S. Kennedy‐ Cos-
tantini, H. S. Sharplin, and S. Morrison. 2021. “Associations Between
Technoference, Quality of Parent‐Infant Interactions, and Infants’ Vo-
cabulary Development.” Infant Behavior and Development 64: 101611.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101611.
Drews, F. A., M. Pasupathi, and D. L. Strayer. 2008. “Passenger and Cell
Phone Conversations in Simulated Driving.” Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Applied 14, no. 4: 392–400. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013119.
Elias, N., D. Lemish, S. Dalyot, and D. Floegel. 2021. “Where Are You?
An Observational Exploration of Parental Technoference in Public
Places in the US and Israel.” Journal of Children and Media 15, no. 3:
376–388. https://doi.org/10.1080/17482798.2020.1815228.
Flavell, J. H. 2004. “Development of Knowledge About Vision.” In
Thinking and Seeing: Visual Metacognition in Adults and Children,
edited by D. T. Levin, 13–36. MIT Press.
Flavell, J. H., F. L. Green, and E. R. Flavell. 1995. “The Development of
Children’s Knowledge About Attentional Focus.” Developmental Psy-
chology 31, no. 4: 706–712. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012‐1649.31.4.706.
Gergely, G., H. Bekkering, and I. Király. 2002. “Rational Imitation in
Preverbal Infants.” Nature 415, no. 6873: 755: 755. https://doi.org/10.
1038/415755a.
Gill, I. K., and J. A. Sommerville. 2023. “Generalizing Across Moral Sub‐
Domains: Infants Bidirectionally Link Fairness and Unfairness to
Helping and Hindering.” Frontiers in Psychology 14: 1213409. https://
doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1213409.
Horwood, S., J. Anglim, and S. R. Mallawaarachchi. 2021. “Problematic
Smartphone Use in a Large Nationally Representative Sample: Age,
Reporting Biases, and Technology Concerns.” Computers in Human
Behavior 122: 106848. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2021.106848.
Kates, A. W., H. Wu, and C. L. S. Coryn. 2018. “The Effects of Mobile
Phone Use on Academic Performance: A Meta‐Analysis.” Computers &
Education 127: 107–112. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2018.08.012.
Kildare, C. A., and W. Middlemiss. 2017. “Impact of Parents Mobile De-
vice Use on Parent‐Child Interaction: A Literature Review.” Computers in
Human Behavior 75: 579–593. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2017.06.003.
Kılıç, A. O., E. Sari, H. Yucel, et al. 2019. “Exposure to and Use of Mobile
Devices in Children Aged 1–60 Months.” European Journal of Pediatrics
178, no. 2: 221–227. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00431‐018‐3284‐x.
Kostić, J. O., and K. R. Ranđelović. 2022. “Digital Distractions: Learning
in a Multitasking Environment.” Psychological Applications and Trends
5: 301–304. https://doi.org/10.36315/2022inpact070.
Krapf‐Bar, D., M. Davidovitch, Y. Rozenblatt‐Perkal, and N. Gueron‐
Sela. 2022. “Maternal Mobile Phone Use During Mother–Child In-
teractions Interferes With the Process of Establishing Joint Attention.”
Developmental Psychology 58, no. 9: 1639–1651. https://doi.org/10.1037/
dev0001388.
Lee, V., and M. D. Rutherford. 2018. “Sixteen‐Month‐Old Infants Are
Sensitive to Competence in Third‐Party Observational Learning.” Infant
Behavior and Development 52: 114–120. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.
2018.07.001.
Lemish, D., N. Elias, and D. Floegel. 2020. “Look at Me! Parental Use of
Mobile Phones at the Playground.” Mobile Media & Communication 8,
no. 2: 170–187. https://doi.org/10.1177/2050157919846916.
Leonard, J. A., Y. Lee, and L. Schulz. 2017. “Infants Make More At-
tempts to Achieve a Goal When They See Adults Persist.” Science 357,
no. 6357: 1290–1294. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aan2317.
Liszkowski, U., M. Carpenter, and M. Tomasello. 2007. “Reference and
Attitude in Infant Pointing.” Journal of Child Language 34, no. 1: 1–20.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000906007689.
Luo, Y. 2010. “Do 8‐Month‐Old Infants Consider Situational Constraints
When Interpreting Others’ Gaze as Goal‐Directed Action?” Infancy 15,
no. 4: 392–419. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1532‐7078.2009.00019.x.
Mangan, E., J. E. Leavy, and J. Jancey. 2018. “Mobile Device Use When
Caring for Children 0‐5 Years: A Naturalistic Playground Study.” Health
Promotion Journal of Australia 29, no. 3: 337–343. https://doi.org/10.
1002/hpja.38.
Marcinowski, E. C., E. Nelson, J. M. Campbell, and G. F. Michel. 2019.
“The Development of Object Construction From Infancy Through Tod-
dlerhood.” Infancy 24, no. 3: 368–391. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12284.
Margoni, F., and L. Thomsen. 2024. “How Infants Predict Respect‐Based
Power.” Cognitive Psychology 152: 101671. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.
cogpsych.2024.101671.
McDaniel, B. T., and S. M. Coyne. 2016. “Technology Interference in the
Parenting of Young Children: Implications for Mothers’ Perceptions of
Coparenting.” Social Science Journal 53, no. 4: 435–443. https://doi.org/
10.1016/j.soscij.2016.04.010.
McDaniel, B. T., J. Pater, V. Cornet, et al. 2023. “Parents’ Desire to
Change Phone Use: Associations With Objective Smartphone Use and
Feelings About Problematic Use and Distraction.” Computers in Human
Behavior 148: 107907. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2023.107907.
Muradoglu, M., and A. Cimpian. 2020. “Children’s Intuitive Theories of
Academic Performance.” Child Development 91, no. 4. https://doi.org/
10.1111/cdev.13325.
Myruski, S., O. Gulyayeva, S. Birk, K. Pérez‐Edgar, K. A. Buss, and T. A.
Dennis‐Tiwary. 2018. “Digital Disruption? Maternal Mobile Device Use
Is Related to Infant Social‐Emotional Functioning.” Developmental Sci-
ence 21, no. 4: e12610. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12610.
Pew Research Center. 2021. “Mobile Fact Sheet.” Mobile Fact Sheet.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact‐sheet/mobile/.
Pillow, B. H. 1989. “Early Understanding of Perception as a Source of
Knowledge.” Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 47, no. 1: 116–
129. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022‐0965(89)90066‐0.
Radesky, J. S., C. J. Kistin, B. Zuckerman, et al. 2014. “Patterns of Mobile
Device Use by Caregivers and Children During Meals in Fast Food
Restaurants.” Pediatrics 133, no. 4: e843–e849. https://doi.org/10.1542/
peds.2013‐3703.
R Core Team 2013. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical
Computing.” [Computer software]. Vienna, Austria, R Foundation for
Statistical Computing. http://www.R‐project.org/.
Roberts, J. A., and M. E. David. 2016. “My Life Has Become a Major
Distraction From My Cell Phone: Partner Phubbing and Relationship
Satisfaction Among Romantic Partners.” Computers in Human Behavior
54: 134–141. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.07.058.
Smith‐Flores, A. S., J. Perez, M. H. Zhang, and L. Feigenson. 2021.
“Online Measures of Looking and Learning in Infancy.” Infancy 27, no.
1: 4–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12435.
Stenberg, G. 2013. “Do 12‐Month‐Old Infants Trust a Competent
Adult?” Infancy 18, no. 5: 873–904. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12011.
Stockdale, L. A., C. L. Porter, S. M. Coyne, et al. 2020. “Infants’ Response
to a Mobile Phone Modied Still‐Face Paradigm: Links to Maternal
Behaviors and Beliefs Regarding Technoference.” Infancy 25, no. 5: 571–
592. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12342.
Treffner, P. J., and R. Barrett. 2004. “Hands‐Free Mobile Phone Speech
While Driving Degrades Coordination and Control.” Transportation
7 of 8
Research Part F: Trafc Psychology and Behaviour 7, no. 4: 229–246.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trf.2004.09.002.
Wang, J. (J.). 2023. “Does Virtual Counting Count for Babies? Evidence
From an Online Looking Time Study.” Developmental Psychology 59, no.
4: 669–675. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001478.
Yang, F., and D. Frye. 2016. “Early Understanding of Ability.” Cognitive
Development 38: 49–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2016.01.003.
Zamanzadeh, N. N., and R. E. Rice. 2021. “A Theory of Media Multi-
tasking Intensity.” Journal of Media Psychology 33, no. 4: 226–239.
https://doi.org/10.1027/1864‐1105/a000316.
8 of 8 Infancy, 2025
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Article
Full-text available
Research has shown that infants represent legitimate leadership and predict continued obedience to authority, but which cues they use to do so remains unknown. Across eight pre-registered experiments varying the cue provided, we tested if Norwegian 21-month-olds (N = 128) expected three protagonists to obey a character even in her absence. We assessed whether bowing for the character, receiving a tribute from or conferring a benefit to the protagonists, imposing a cost on them (forcefully taking a resource or hitting them), or relative physical size were used as cues to generate the expectation of continued obedience that marks legitimate leadership. Whereas bowing sufficed in generating such an expectation, we found positive Bayesian evidence that all the other cues did not. Norwegian infants unlikely have witnessed bowing in their everyday life. Hence, bowing/prostration as cue for continued obedience may form part of an early-developing capacity to represent leadership built by evolution.
Article
Full-text available
Across two experiments, we investigated whether infants use prior behavior to form expectations about future behavior within the moral domain, focusing on the sub-domains of fairness and help/harm. In Experiment 1, 14- to 27-month-old infants were familiarized to an agent who either helped or hindered another agent to obtain her goal. At test, infants saw the helper or hinderer perform either a fair or unfair distribution of resources to two recipients. Infants familiarized to helping looked longer to the unfair distribution than the fair distribution at test, whereas infants familiarized to hindering looked equally at both test events, suggesting that hindering led infants to suspend baseline expectations of fairness. In Experiment 2, infants saw these events in reverse. Following familiarization to fair behavior, infants looked equally to helping and hindering; in contrast, following familiarization to unfair behavior, infants looked significantly longer to helping than hindering on test, suggesting that prior unfair behavior led infants to expect the agent to hinder another agent’s goals. These results suggest that infants utilize prior information from one moral sub-domain to form expectations of how an individual will behave in another sub-domain, and that this tendency seems to manifest more strongly when infants initially see hindering and unfair distributions than when they see helping and fair distributions. Together, these findings provide evidence for consilience within the moral domain, starting by at least the second year of life.
Article
Full-text available
Infants who receive better counting input at home tend to become toddlers with better number knowledge in preschool. However, for many children, in-person counting experience is not always available, despite educational media becoming increasingly prevalent. Might virtual counting experience benefit the young mind? Using a novel online looking time paradigm, a cross-sectional sample of 14- to 19-month-old infants’ (United States; N = 81; 35 females; 64% White; within-subject design) ability to keep track of objects presented on screen was measured. We found that infants were significantly more likely to detect a change in numerical quantity after watching the objects being pointed at and counted by an animated hand compared with when there was no counting. These findings provide initial evidence for numerical cognitive benefits from counting video relative to a no counting baseline before the second birthday.
Article
Full-text available
Parental mobile device use while parenting has been associated with reduced parental responsiveness and increased negative affect among children. However, it remains unclear whether it can interfere with the process of acquiring social communication skills. Thus, this study sought to experimentally examine whether maternal mobile phone use while interacting with the child has an immediate effect on the frequency of mothers' and infants' joint attention (JA) behaviors, the likelihood that these behaviors will lead to JA episodes, and the duration of established JA episodes. Participants were a community sample of 114 (Mage = 11.36 months; 50% male) Israeli typically developing infants, in which most mothers were highly educated and living in two-parent families. Mother-infant dyads completed a modified still-face paradigm and were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions during the still-face phase: (a) mobile phone disruptions, (b) social disruptions, and (c) undisrupted play. Mother-infant interactions were coded for frequency of JA behaviors and duration of JA episodes. In dyads assigned to the mobile phone disruptions condition, infants produced more JA initiations, mothers were less likely to contingently respond to infant initiations, JA behaviors were less likely to result in established JA, and JA episodes were shorter compared to dyads in the two control conditions and the baseline free play phase. Findings suggest that maternal mobile phone use during face-to-face interactions with the infant can disrupt the process of establishing JA in ongoing mother-child interactions. Possible implications from this line of work for family digital media use are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
Conference Paper
Full-text available
"Modern learning environment is filled with digital distractions. Distractions lead students to engage in multitasking, i.e., task-switching, during the teaching and learning process - to shift attention from learning content to non-course-related activities. Psychological research is mostly focused on examining the negative effects of multitasking in three areas: cognition and academic performance; health; and interpersonal relationships. This paper deals with the field of academic achievement - specifically the effects that digital distractions have on students and the learning process. An analysis of articles published in scientific journals in the last five years has been done. Articles were searched through the EBSCO Discovery Service, and the searched terms were ?multitasking?, ?digital distraction? and ?learning?, in the title, abstract and/or keywords. In order for the article to be included in the analysis, it was necessary for it to deal with the learning process at least in part. Thus, 11 articles that were the results of empirical studies and 4 review/theoretically oriented articles were selected. The results of empirical studies show that multitasking may reduce learners’ capacity for cognitive processing causing poor academic performance. Multitasking is more common in those media that provide instant emotional gratification, such as social media applications and sites. College instructors notice that digital distractions in the classroom negatively affect the teacher-student relationship, impair their job satisfaction, as well as the integrity of the classroom learning environment. Review studies, among other things, show that digital self-control interventions, which have been developed to alleviate the negative impact of digital distractions, are not effective enough. Banning the use of mobile devices in the classroom is not a good solution either, because banning the use of phones can encourage nomophobia, which will also negatively affect concentration and learning. For older students, banning the use of laptops leads to absenteeism from classes. What teachers can do is encourage students to write lecture notes by hand - in addition to making students more active, it has been confirmed that handwritten notes are more detailed than digital ones and lead to a more permanent recall. Technology breaks can also be effective in reducing multitasking: after a period of learning without multitasking, there is a break in which students can check text messages or social media."
Article
Full-text available
This article first situates media multitasking in the changing media ecology. Then, grounded in concepts of stress and flow, limited capacity, and threaded cognition, it develops a four-dimensional theory of media multitasking intensity. Based on the key aspects of media multitasking intensity, the subsequent section proposes two primary influences (executive functioning and self-regulation) and one primary outcome (general stress). An application example focuses on several media multitasking issues and the stress outcome for adolescents within their family environment. The final section suggests a few key methodological implications for studying the theory of media multitasking intensity (self-report, and both temporal and social contexts). The theory of media multitasking intensity generates insights about the functional (i.e., valuable) variation within experiences of media as they overlap with and interrupt experiences of the physical and mediated world.
Article
Full-text available
Infants in laboratory settings look longer at events that violate their expectations, learn better about objects that behave unexpectedly, and match utterances to the objects that likely elicited them. The paradigms revealing these behaviors have become cornerstones of research on preverbal cognition. However, little is known about whether these canonical behaviors are observed outside laboratory settings. Here, we describe a series of online protocols that replicate classic laboratory findings, detailing our methods throughout. In Experiment 1a, 15‐month‐old infants (N = 24) looked longer at an online support event culminating in an Unexpected outcome (i.e., appearing to defy gravity) than an Expected outcome. Infants did not, however, show the same success with an online solidity event. In Experiment 1b, 15‐month‐old infants (N = 24) showed surprise‐induced learning following online events—they were better able to learn a novel object's label when the object had behaved unexpectedly compared to when it behaved expectedly. Finally, in Experiment 2, 16‐month‐old infants (N = 20) who heard a valenced utterance (“Yum!”) showed preferential looking to the object most likely to have generated that utterance. Together, these results suggest that, with some adjustments, online testing is a feasible and promising approach for infant cognition research.
Article
Full-text available
This study utilized data from a nationally representative sample of Australian adults (n = 1164; 50.7% female; age M = 44.9 years, SD = 16.3) to examine the relationships between age, technology concerns, self-rated and objective amount of smartphone use, and problematic smartphone use. Participants completed measures of problematic smartphone use and technology concern, while amount of smartphone use was self-rated and objectively measured using device-level smartphone screen time reporting tools (Screen Time for iOS and Digital Wellbeing for Android). Amount of self-rated and objective smartphone use declined linearly with age. In contrast, problematic smartphone use was relatively high and stable in young adults before rapidly declining around age 40. People were reasonably good at estimating their amount of smartphone use (r = 0.73), although they did tend to underestimate usage. Technology concern was high across all ages, but unrelated to amount of usage and problematic smartphone usage. Age related differences are interpreted in terms of a combination of developmental and generational changes. Results also suggest that amount of use is an important but not complete cause of problematic smartphone use.
Article
We examined objective smartphone use (via a mobile sensing application) and self-reported desire to change phone use among a sample of 268 U.S. parents of infants. Using the Transtheoretical Stages of Change model as a conceptual foundation, we contextualized their attitudes and behaviors and explored how phone use and desire to change relate to perceptions of distraction and problematic phone use around their child. Latent profile analysis of parents' precontemplation, contemplation, and action scores revealed two classes—precontemplators (15%) and contemplators (85%). Contemplators—those considering or desiring change—showed more bedtime phone use and general social networking than precontemplors; however, there were no significant differences between groups on other objective use measures (e.g., total daily duration of phone use, phone use around child, etc.). Contemplators also showed greater perceptions of problematic use around their child and parenting distraction. Moreover, parents’ problematic use and distraction were predictive of higher contemplation scores, even after controlling for demographic and objective phone use variables. Taken together, these results suggest that perceptions of phone use as problematic may be more important than actual phone habits, especially total phone use duration, for desire to change. Suggestions for future research and intervention are provided.
Article
“Technoference” describes the distraction from interpersonal activities that can occur due to use of mobile screen devices. Focusing on parent-infant interactions, our study investigated the associations between potential sources of “technoference” and parental responsiveness, scaffolding and directiveness toward their infant, and coordinated joint attention (CJA). Previous research demonstrates that each of these dimensions is related to early language development. Potential sources of “technoference” employed in our study included the amount of time the parent spends on their mobile device per hour when with their infant; the number of audible notifications the parent receives per hour, the number of times per hour they check their device; and parents’ score on the Distraction In Social Relations and Use of Parent Technology (DISRUPT) scale. We investigated associations between our measures of parental “technoference” and infants’ language development, and whether parental responsiveness, scaffolding, directiveness or parent-infant CJA mediate associations between “technoference” and language. Frequency of audible notifications negatively predicted infant vocabulary, and this relationship was fully mediated by parental directiveness.