Mobile State of Mind: The Effect of Cognitive Load on Mobile Users’ Cognitive Performance

Over the past decade, users have increasingly been relying on mobile devices (mainly smartphones) rather than on personal computers (PCs) to accomplish diverse computerized tasks. While this “shift-to-mobile” has generally been considered as a positive technological evolution, this study proposes that, under certain conditions, the cognitive performance of mobile users is poorer than that of PC users engaged in similar tasks. We provide evidence in support of this proposition in two experiments, utilizing a website specifically designed for studying users’ cognitive performance under natural conditions. We find that, when users are engaged in decision-making tasks that involve high cognitive load, mobile users perform less accurately in these tasks than PC users do. Under low cognitive load, in contrast, decision accuracy does not significantly differ between mobile and PC users. We observe this interaction effect for different types of cognitive load, intrinsic and extraneous, despite their opposite effects on decision accuracy