APA Research Paper Example: A Full APA 7 Student Paper

Student Name

Department of Psychology, University Name

PSYC 201: Introduction to Cognitive Psychology

Instructor Name

15 September 2026

Smartphone Presence and Available Working Memory in Undergraduates: A Literature-Based Review

Note 1 (title page): An APA 7 student title page carries the title, student name, department and institution, course number and name, instructor, due date, and a page number. No running head is required on a student paper; that rule applies to professional manuscripts.

Abstract

Smartphones are rarely out of reach for most undergraduates, and a growing body of research asks whether their mere presence, not active use, affects cognitive performance. This review synthesizes evidence on the "brain drain" hypothesis: that a nearby smartphone occupies limited-capacity attentional resources even while silent and unused. Ward et al. (2017) found that undergraduates who left phones in another room outperformed those who kept phones on the desk on tests of working memory and fluid intelligence, an effect that held across two experiments (N = 520 and N = 275) regardless of whether the phone was on or off. Thornton et al. (2014) found a parallel cost on demanding tasks, but not simple ones, when a phone sat visible during testing. A 2020 replication, by contrast, found no cognitive cost on short-term or prospective memory tasks, complicating a simple presence-always-costs account. This review synthesizes eight sources and names where the effect is best supported and where it is not.

Keywords: smartphone presence, working memory, cognitive capacity, attention, undergraduates

Note 2 (abstract): Under 200 words, states the method, names the key studies and their sample sizes, and ends on what the review adds, not a restated title. APA 7 requires no indent on the abstract paragraph.

Smartphone Presence and Available Working Memory in Undergraduates: A Literature-Based Review

Working memory, the limited-capacity system that holds and manipulates information during a task, predicts performance on everything from reading comprehension to problem-solving. Ward et al. (2017) proposed that a smartphone does not need to ring or buzz to draw on this capacity; its mere presence, as a high-priority, personally relevant object, may occupy attentional resources that would otherwise support the task at hand. This review synthesizes the laboratory and classroom evidence for that claim, then examines findings that complicate it.

The question matters for coursework because most undergraduates study, attend lectures, and take tests with a phone within reach. If presence alone draws on working memory, silencing a phone would not be enough; the phone would need to leave the room. The review therefore asks two questions. First, does a nearby but unused smartphone lower performance on tasks that load working memory? Second, is the effect general, or does it depend on the kind of task measured? Sources were located through PsycINFO and Google Scholar with the terms smartphone presence, mere presence, and working memory, and were included if they manipulated or measured phone presence and reported a cognitive outcome.

Evidence for the Brain Drain Effect

Two lines of evidence, controlled laboratory tasks and classroom-style field tasks, converge on the same pattern.

Note 3 (heading levels): "Evidence for the Brain Drain Effect" is Level 1, centered and bold; "Laboratory Evidence" is Level 2, flush left and bold, nested under it.

Laboratory Evidence

Ward et al. (2017) randomly assigned 520 undergraduates to keep their phone on the desk, in a bag or pocket, or in another room while completing an operation-span task (working memory) and a set of Raven's matrices (fluid intelligence). The other-room group outperformed the desk group on both measures, even though participants did not report thinking about their phones more in the desk condition. A second experiment (N = 275) replicated the working memory effect regardless of whether the phone was on or off, ruling out notifications as the mechanism, but found no effect on a behavioral measure of sustained attention. Skowronek et al. (2023) found a comparable pattern in adults aged 20 to 34: an attention test scored lower with a smartphone on the table than without one.

Classroom and Field Evidence

Thornton et al. (2014) seated 54 undergraduates in pairs for two timed attention tasks while a cell phone or a notebook sat visibly on one desk. Performance did not differ on the simpler digit-cancellation and Trail Making Part A tasks, but on the harder additive-cancellation task and Trail Making Part B, the cell phone group scored lower, F(1, 48) = 5.38, p < .05 and F(1, 48) = 6.79, p < .05. The cost appeared only on the more demanding tasks. Related field research agrees: Kuznekoff and Titsworth (2013) found that students who did not use their phones during a recorded lecture wrote down 62% more information in their notes and scored higher on a later test than heavy phone users, and Stothart et al. (2015) found an unanswered notification alone, without any phone use, measurably disrupted a sustained-attention task.

Null and Boundary Findings

Not every study finds a cost. Hartmann et al. (2020), testing adult participants on short-term and prospective memory tasks, found no overall effect of smartphone presence on either measure, a result the authors describe as a failure to replicate the original brain-drain effect on those specific tasks.

Note 4 (et al. rule): APA 7 shortens any source with three or more authors to "et al." from the first citation, a change from APA 6.

Barr et al. (2015) approached the question differently, finding habitual smartphone reliance correlates with lower scores on a test of analytic thinking, a correlational finding about disposition, not a causal presence test, treated here as a related but separate construct. With Uncapher and Wagner's (2018) caution that media-multitasking research still lacks a settled mechanism, these findings suggest the effect is real but task-specific, not universal.

Discussion

Across the eight sources reviewed here, the effect is most consistently found on tasks that load heavily on working memory or sustained cognitive effort, Ward et al.'s span and matrices tasks, Thornton et al.'s additive cancellation, and is weaker or absent on simpler tasks and on the short-term and prospective memory measures Hartmann et al. tested. Table 1 summarizes the pattern across studies.

Table 1

Reviewed Studies on Smartphone Presence and Cognitive Performance

Note. Effect direction reflects each study's own reported statistical comparison, not a reanalysis of raw data.

Note 5 (table note): APA 7 puts a bold label ("Table 1") and an italic title above the table, and a general note, introduced by an italic "Note.", below it.

The gap this review identifies is not whether presence effects exist, current evidence says they do, but which tasks they touch. No source reviewed here tests whether the effect holds in a live classroom exam rather than a lab span task, which limits how directly these findings generalize to coursework. A useful next study would compare exam performance, not lab scores, across randomly assigned phone-location conditions in an actual course.

For students, the practical reading is modest. The strongest evidence supports moving a phone out of sight, or out of the room, during work that demands sustained reasoning, such as problem sets or exam review. It does not support the broader claim that any phone anywhere harms any task, and the null result from Hartmann et al. (2020) is a reminder that a single task type can make an effect look more general than it is.

References

Barr, N., Pennycook, G., Stolz, J. A., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2015). The brain in your pocket: Evidence that smartphones are used to supplant thinking. Computers in Human Behavior, 48, 473-480. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.02.029

Hartmann, M., Martarelli, C. S., Reber, T. P., & Rothen, N. (2020). Does a smartphone on the desk drain our brain? No evidence of cognitive costs due to smartphone presence in a short-term and prospective memory task. Consciousness and Cognition, 86, Article 103033. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2020.103033

Kuznekoff, J. H., & Titsworth, S. (2013). The impact of mobile phone usage on student learning. Communication Education, 62(3), 233-252. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2013.767917

Skowronek, J., Seifert, A., & Lindberg, S. (2023). The mere presence of a smartphone reduces basal attentional performance. Scientific Reports, 13, Article 9363. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-36256-4

Stothart, C., Mitchum, A., & Yehnert, C. (2015). The attentional cost of receiving a cell phone notification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 41(4), 893-897. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000100

Thornton, B., Faires, A., Robbins, M., & Rollins, E. (2014). The mere presence of a cell phone may be distracting: Implications for attention and task performance. Social Psychology, 45(6), 479-488. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000216

Uncapher, M. R., & Wagner, A. D. (2018). Minds and brains of media multitaskers: Current findings and future directions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(40), 9889-9896. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1611612115

Ward, A. F., Duke, K., Gneezy, A., & Bos, M. W. (2017). Brain drain: The mere presence of one's own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2(2), 140-154. https://doi.org/10.1086/691462

Note 6 (reference hanging indent): Each entry has a hanging indent, first line flush left and later lines indented, and the list is alphabetized by first author surname.