title: Please silence your cell phone: Your ringtone captures other people's attention.
abstract: Ringtones are designed to draw attention away from on-going activities. In the present study, it was investigated whether the disruptive effects of a ringing cell phone on short-term memory are inevitable or become smaller as a function of exposure and whether (self-) relevance plays a role. Participants performed a serial recall task either in silence or while task-irrelevant ringtones were presented. Performance was worse when a ringing phone had to be ignored, but gradually recovered compared with the quiet control condition with repeated presentation of the distractor sound. Whether the participant's own ringtone was played or that of a yoked-control partner did not affect performance and habituation rate. The results offer insight into auditory distraction by highly attention-demanding distractors and recovery therefrom. Implications for work environments and other applied settings are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany.
authors.forename: Jan P
authors.initials: JP
authors.lastname: Röer
authors.forename: Raoul
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Bell
authors.forename: Axel
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Buchner
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D001288:Attention / Q000528:radiation effects*; D040421:Cell Phone; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000528:radiation effects*; D011939:Mental Recall / Q000528:radiation effects*; D015999:Multivariate Analysis; D013016:Sound / Q000009:adverse effects*; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D055815:Young Adult