Cell Phone Ringing

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The purpose of the study done on cell phone ringing during a lecture was to determine if a cell phone ringing during a lecture would impact learning. The hypothesis was that the students in the ringing condition would not remember content from the interruption and therefore the students would not learn as well. The study was done by randomly assigning participants to either a ringing group or the non-ringing control group. The participants were asked to watch an educational video and take notes as they would be given a test at the end of the section. In the ringing group a confederate’s phone rang twice throughout the study at specific times. The results of the study showed that participants in the ringing control group did worse on test …show more content…

In both studies the researchers were looking at divided attention. The study about cell phone ringing was seeing how people’s learning would be affected when a student had both the lecture and ringing to pay attention to. In the study about note taking, divided attention was also tested because the first set of students had to take notes as well as listen to a lecture, compared to the second set of students who did not have to divide their attention. Divided attention is the process of doing two or more things at once; it can only be done if all of the tasks do not require more resources than is available. Most people are not able to multitask and therefore having to take notes while listening and participating in a lecture is not possible. It also means that when attention is divided between a cell phone and the notes, the students are likely not able to pay attention to both and learning will suffer. The cell phone also activated orientating attention, which is a basic type of input attention. The process to turn and pay attention to the ringing of the phone is automatic and does not require a lot of effort. They do not have to choose to pay attention to the stimuli, but it does take away attention from the other things they are trying to do. For selective attention people choose what to pay attention to. The second study tested this by seeing if students would choose to pay attention to the lecture when they did not have to take notes. Selective attention is only paying attention to one stimulus, while ignoring everything else in the environment. Students are voluntarily using mental resources to focus on the material in the lecture while they could be focusing on other stimuli in the

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