Smartphones and Information Search

Smartphones and the affordance of looking up information: Does having a smartphone on the table/in pocket/out of the room while one solves a problem involving searching for information (eg. naming the capitals of European cities) cause one to give up earlier (vs a task that doesn't involve seeking information, such as a puzzle), because the smartphone creates the affordance of just looking the information up (thus raising the expected rate of reward)? Prediction would be that the presence of a smartphone makes one give up earlier for task that involve searching information, but not for tasks that are challenging for another reason. Should be easy to get an online pretest off the ground.

Members

Judit Mokos, Codi Stevens, Amalia Bastos, Staci Meredith Weiss, Felix Binder