Does Cell Phone Usage Have an Effect on Cognitive Flexibility?

The usage of cell phones is intermittent with the daily activities thereby having a great impact on individual’s life, thus it also has an impact on our cognitive functioning, such as cognitive flexibility. The purpose of the present study was to examine how the usage of cell phones impacted the cognitive flexibility of individuals. Thirty female graduate students, the age ranging from 20-25 years (mean age 22.22 years) participated in the study. Cell phone usage of the participants was assessed using the Mobile Phone Addiction Scale (Velayudhan & Srividya, 2012). Cognitive flexibility was measured using Stroop task and Switcher task available on an open source software known as PEBL (Mueller & Piper, 2014). One-way analysis of variance was used to find the effect of cell phone usage on the cognitive flexibility of the participants. The result indicated non-significant effect of cell phone usage on the cognitive flexibility of the participants. However, mean scores indicated that low cell phone users performed better on the measures of cognitive flexibility in comparison to high and moderate user groups.