On average, Americans spend almost five hours a day using their smartphones, and half of Americans who use smartphones worry they use their devices too much. Noah Castelo and colleagues sought to determine whether constant access to the Internet through smartphones harms cognitive functioning and mental health. Their results are published in PNAS Nexus.
The authors recruited 467 participants from Prolific.co, an online labor pool, to install an app on their iPhones that blocked all internet access on their phones. Half the participants had their phones blocked for the first two weeks, during which time the other half of participants functioned as a control. The groups switched treatments for the second two-week period....<<<Read More>>>...
