It has recently been shown that the mere presence of one’s own smartphone on the desk impairs working memory performance. The aim of this study was to follow up on this important finding by assessing the effect of smartphone presence (present on the desk vs. absent from the desk) on different memory functions (short-term memory and prospective memory), and by further examining the moderating role of individual differences in smartphone dependency and impulsiveness. We found no overall effect of smartphone presence on short-term and prospective memory performance. There was a moderating effect for prospective memory: Performance was better when the smartphone was absent versus present for participants with low smartphone dependency. In light of the absence of an overall effect of smartphone presence on memory functions, our results show that previous findings of impairments in working memory due to smartphone presence do not generalize to other domains of memory capacity.

The aim of this study was to extend previous findings related to the detrimental effects of the mere presence of one’s own smartphone on cognitive performance (Thornton et al., 2014; Ward et al., 2017). The rationale behind the study was that the presence of a highly relevant and salient object like one’s smartphone attracts attention even when it is not in use, which in turn reduces the availability of cognitive resources for other tasks (Thornton et al., 2014; Ward et al., 2017). We did not find support for a negative effect of smartphone presence on short-term memory. The number of recalled items was comparable between the condition when the smartphone was present on the desk as compared to when it was absent. There was also no support for our hypotheses that the detrimental effect of smartphone presence would be more pronounced when task difficulty is high, when smartphone-related items were processed during encoding, or when the individual dependency on the smartphone was high.