This study was designed to examine the deficit of inhibitory mechanism in cognition and attention process in adults with smartphone addiction tendency. In experiment 1, Probe recognition reading span task was conducted to explore inhibition mechanism ...
This study was designed to examine the deficit of inhibitory mechanism in cognition and attention process in adults with smartphone addiction tendency. In experiment 1, Probe recognition reading span task was conducted to explore inhibition mechanism in cognition process. In addition, to investigate respond characteristic of adults with smartphone addiction tendency, sets of sentences were used as experiment stimuli. The sentences were composed of smartphone related or unrelated words. The result of experiment 1, First, smartphone addiction tendency group did not show selective inhibition for irrelevant information. Second, smartphone addiction tendency group took longer response time when processing smartphone-unrelated information compared to the control group. However, these groups did not show a significant difference in the reaction when they processe smartphone-related information. These results suggested that smartphone addiction tendency had difficulties in inhibition ability for irrelevant information. It means that efficiency of executive function of working memory is degraded. And also, it showed that there was distinct respond characteristic of smartphone addiction tendency in comparison with control group. In Experiment 2, Inhibition of return task was conducted to explore inhibition mechanism in attention process. The result of experiment 2, smartphone addiction tendency group showed less inhibition of return compared to control group. In summary, all of these results suggested that adults with smartphone addiction tendency had decreased inhibition mechanism in cognition and attention process. The result of the present study could be use in understanding the characteristic of smartphone addiction and it will be useful to make a diagnosis of smartphone addiction.