A new study shows that the overheard half of cell phone dialogue can steal our attention from other tasks, with potentially dangerous outcomes.
Currently a doctoral candidate in psychology at Cornell University, Lauren Emberson and her co-authors recently published a study that helps explain why hearing only one half of a cell phone conversation is so aggravating, yet so captivating. The researchers argue that such "half-alogues," as they dub them, make for dissonant eavesdropping because they are unpredictable. The less information we glean from a conversation, the harder our brains work to make sense of what we hear and the more difficult it is to stop listening. The findings, published online September 3 in Psychological Science, further suggest that cell phone half-alogues demand more of our attention than dialogues and decrease our performance on other cognitive tasks—whether we are sitting at a computer in the lab, trying to read on the subway or driving a car. (more)
