Chapter 13 Exercises: Memory, Attention, and the Cognitive Cost of Scrolling

Reflection Exercises

Exercise 1 [Reflection] Reflect honestly on your own experience of attention in academic or professional settings over the past week. How many times per hour did you check your phone during class, study sessions, or work periods? How long did each check last? Did you notice any difficulty returning to the prior task after checking? Write a one-page reflection analyzing your own interruption patterns and their cognitive costs using the chapter's framework.

Exercise 2 [Reflection] Think of a time when you were fully absorbed in an intellectually demanding activity — a long reading session, a creative project, a difficult problem you were working through — and experienced what Csikszentmihalyi calls "flow." Describe the conditions that supported that state: Where were you? What was your phone situation? What was your notification environment? What does this reflection reveal about what you need from your environment to achieve sustained focus?

Exercise 3 [Reflection] Apply Kahneman's System 1 / System 2 framework to your social media use yesterday. List five specific moments of social media engagement and classify each as primarily System 1 (automatic, effortless, emotional) or primarily System 2 (deliberate, effortful, analytical). What does your classification reveal about the cognitive demands of your typical social media experience?

Exercise 4 [Reflection] Recall the last time you had a significant piece of information you needed to remember — a phone number, an address, a deadline, a name — and immediately thought "I'll just Google it later" instead of making an effort to remember it. Did you actually look it up? If so, did you retain the information after looking it up? What does this exercise reveal about your own experience of the Google effect?

Exercise 5 [Reflection] Write a "cognitive day in the life" — a detailed account of your typical weekday, tracking your attention and its interruptions from waking to sleeping. At what points were you in sustained focus? At what points were you interrupted? By what? How long did interruptions last, and how long did it take to return to focus? What patterns do you notice?

Research Exercises

Exercise 6 [Research] Locate and read Gloria Mark's original research on interruption and recovery time. Starting with her 2004 paper "The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress" (with Daniela Gudith and Ulrich Klocke), trace the development of her research on interruption through subsequent publications. How has her understanding of interruption costs evolved? What are the methodological strengths and limitations of her approach?

Exercise 7 [Research] Find and read the Ward et al. (2017) brain drain study: "Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One's Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity." Summarize the experimental design, key findings, and proposed mechanism. What subsequent research has replicated or challenged these findings? What are the study's main limitations?

Exercise 8 [Research] Research the Ophir, Nass, and Wagner (2009) multitasking study in depth. What specific attention tasks did the researchers use? How did they define "heavy" vs. "light" media multitaskers? What alternative explanations exist for the finding that heavy multitaskers perform worse on attention tasks? What subsequent research has extended or challenged their findings?

Exercise 9 [Research] Investigate the Betsy Sparrow et al. (2011) "Google effect" research: "Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips." Summarize the four experiments the paper reports and their findings. What is the transactive memory framework that the authors use to explain their results? What has subsequent research in this area found?

Exercise 10 [Research] Find three peer-reviewed studies published since 2018 on the relationship between smartphone use or social media use and academic performance. For each study, note the methodology, sample, key finding, and limitations. What does the collective evidence suggest about the nature and magnitude of the relationship? Where do the studies disagree, and why?

Exercise 11 [Research] Research Herbert Simon's biography and his concept of "bounded rationality" as well as his 1971 formulation of the attention economy. How does Simon's broader intellectual framework relate to the attention economy concept? What did Simon predict about the information environment that has proven accurate, and what did he fail to anticipate?

Analysis Exercises

Exercise 12 [Analysis] Conduct a cognitive cost analysis of your typical social media session. For a session of your actual typical length, calculate: the number of content items encountered (estimate), the average seconds per item, the estimated depth of processing for each item category (text, video, image), and the estimated proportion of items retained 24 hours later. What does your analysis suggest about the cognitive return on time invested in social media?

Exercise 13 [Analysis] Apply cognitive load theory to three specific types of social media content: (1) a TikTok video with music, text overlay, and visual effects; (2) a Twitter/X thread of twelve connected posts; and (3) a single Instagram photograph with a long caption. For each, identify the sources of intrinsic load (complexity of the content), extraneous load (design elements that don't contribute to understanding), and germane load (processing that contributes to learning). What does your analysis reveal about the cognitive demands of different content types?

Exercise 14 [Analysis] Analyze the twenty-three-minute interruption recovery figure for your own typical work or study context. If you typically work in two-hour blocks and are interrupted (by notifications, device checks, or other attention pulls) an average of five times per two-hour block, what is the maximum period of uninterrupted focused work you can achieve? How does this compare with the demands of your most cognitively demanding tasks? What does the analysis suggest about the compatibility of your current notification environment with sustained intellectual work?

Exercise 15 [Analysis] Compare the cognitive demands of reading a physical book with reading content on a social media platform, using the concepts of attention, working memory, cognitive load, and encoding depth. Your analysis should address: the physical properties of the medium (one source vs. many; linear vs. nonlinear navigation); the notification environment typically associated with each; the processing mode each typically engages; and the memory retention typically produced. What does your comparison suggest about the different cognitive relationships these two media create?

Exercise 16 [Analysis] Evaluate the claim that "the internet is making us stupid" (a common claim that Nicholas Carr's work is sometimes associated with). Using the research from this chapter, assess: What is the claim actually saying? What is the evidence for and against it? What does "stupid" mean in this context, and is it the right framing? What alternative claims would be more precise and better supported by the evidence?

Exercise 17 [Analysis] The chapter describes attention residue as the cognitive spillover from social media into subsequent tasks. Design a study to measure attention residue from a specific social media platform. Describe: what you would measure (operationalization of attention residue), your experimental design (including comparison conditions), your participant population, and your primary outcome measures. What methodological challenges do you anticipate?

Creative Exercises

Exercise 18 [Creative] Write a short story (800–1,000 words) in which the protagonist, Maya, successfully creates a "cognitive sanctuary" — a study period free from digital interruption — and experiences a quality of sustained attention she had almost forgotten was possible. The story should be psychologically realistic (what does that kind of attention actually feel like when it hasn't been practiced?) and grounded in the chapter's concepts. Include a brief postscript reflecting on what the creative exercise revealed.

Exercise 19 [Creative] Design a "cognitive wellbeing feature" for a major social media platform — a feature that helps users understand and manage the cognitive costs of their use. Your feature should be grounded in the research from this chapter, realistic in terms of current platform capabilities, and designed to be genuinely useful rather than cosmetically compliant with regulatory expectations. Present your design as a product brief with: feature description, psychological rationale, user experience description, and anticipated business model implications.

Exercise 20 [Creative] Write a letter from Gloria Mark to a high school student explaining, in accessible language, what her research means for the student's study habits. The letter should be accurate to the research, engaging for a teenage reader, and practically useful — it should contain real guidance, not merely a list of alarming findings. Length: 500–700 words.

Exercise 21 [Creative] Create a "mind map of distraction" — a visual representation of all the sources of cognitive interruption in your typical study environment, the mechanisms through which each interrupts (notification, visual cue, auditory, social obligation), the recovery cost of each, and the impact on your most cognitively demanding work. Use any visual format. In a brief narrative, analyze what your map reveals about your most costly and most tractable sources of distraction.

Exercise 22 [Creative] Write the scene in which Velocity Media's Dr. Aisha Johnson presents the chapter's cognitive research — Ward's brain drain study, Mark's interruption research, and Ophir et al.'s multitasking findings — to the product team as evidence that Velocity's current design is creating cognitive costs for its users. How does Marcus Webb respond? How does CEO Sarah Chen evaluate the competing considerations? Write the dialogue (800–1,000 words) in a way that gives each perspective genuine weight.

Group Exercises

Exercise 23 [Group] Conduct a group "phone in the room" experiment. In groups of four, have all members complete the same set of cognitive tasks (a reading comprehension passage and a set of logic puzzles) under two conditions: phones on the table and phones in another room (counterbalanced order, with one week between conditions). Compare results within and across groups. What did you find? How do your results compare with Ward et al.'s findings?

Exercise 24 [Group] As a group, develop and administer a brief survey (8–10 questions) to at least 20 students on your campus assessing: phone use during study, number of daily notifications, self-reported interruptions per study hour, and self-rated study effectiveness. Analyze and present results to the class. What do your findings reveal about the distribution of interruption costs in your campus community?

Exercise 25 [Group] Role-play a faculty meeting at Maya's high school in which teachers are debating a proposal to require all students to place phones in a designated phone holder at the front of the classroom during all class periods. Assign roles: a teacher in favor (citing the brain drain and attention residue research), a teacher opposed (citing student rights and the argument that students need to learn self-regulation), a parent advocate (representing parents concerned about emergency contact), and a student representative (representing students' perspective). Debrief: What considerations were most important? What would constitute a good policy outcome?

Exercise 26 [Group] Conduct a "deep work experiment" as a group. For one week, each member of the group commits to one ninety-minute period each day with no phone present and no internet access except for task-specific research. Keep daily logs of: what you worked on, how the quality of focus compared to typical, what you noticed about the transition into and out of the period, and any unintended benefits or costs. Share and compare results at the end of the week.

Exercise 27 [Group] Design and conduct a study — using yourselves as participants — on reading comprehension under different conditions. Have each group member read the same 1,000-word passage under three conditions: (1) phone present and notifications on, (2) phone present and notifications off, (3) phone in another room. After each reading, complete a ten-question comprehension quiz. Analyze results across conditions and individuals. What do your findings suggest about the cognitive effects of phone presence and notification status?

Extended Projects

Exercise 28 [Extended Project] Conduct an original study on the relationship between smartphone notification frequency and self-reported cognitive effectiveness among students on your campus. Survey at least 50 participants about their daily notification count, how often they check during study, their self-rated ability to focus, and their GPA (optional, self-report). Analyze results and write a research report (1,500–2,000 words) following social science report format.

Exercise 29 [Extended Project] Implement and document a personal "deep work" practice over four weeks. In the first week, work normally and document your interruption patterns, time on task, and output quality. In weeks two through four, implement increasingly strict "phone in another room" and notification-free deep work periods. Keep a daily log and write a 2,000-word autoethnographic analysis comparing the four weeks.

Exercise 30 [Extended Project] Read Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010) in its entirety. Write a 2,500-word critical response that: summarizes Carr's core argument; evaluates it against the peer-reviewed research cited in this chapter; identifies the strongest and weakest elements of his argument; and arrives at your own assessment of how well-supported his claims are by the available evidence.

Exercise 31 [Extended Project] Design a school policy on smartphone use during class periods that is grounded in the cognitive research from this chapter. Your policy should: specify what devices are permitted and under what conditions, provide a rationale for each provision based on specific research findings, address objections from students, parents, and teachers, and include an evaluation plan for assessing its effectiveness. Length: 2,000–2,500 words.

Exercise 32 [Extended Project] Research and write a comprehensive literature review (2,500–3,000 words) on the relationship between media multitasking and academic performance. Your review should cover: the definition of media multitasking, the range of research designs used, the convergent findings, areas of disagreement, and the implications for educational practice. Include at least twelve peer-reviewed sources.

Exercise 33 [Extended Project] Investigate the cognitive effects of social media use on creativity — an area less studied than attention and memory but potentially important. Find at least five peer-reviewed papers on this topic, synthesize the findings, and write a 2,000-word analysis of what is known and unknown about the relationship between social media use patterns and creative thinking.

Exercise 34 [Extended Project] Design a research study to test whether the processing mode conditioned by social media use transfers to reading comprehension tasks. Your study should address: how to operationalize "processing mode," how to assess baseline vs. post-social-media reading comprehension, how to control for confounds including mood, fatigue, and content familiarity, and what comparison conditions you would use. Write a 2,000-word study protocol.

Exercise 35 [Extended Project] Create a comprehensive "cognitive environment design guide" for students, covering: the research on phone presence and cognitive capacity; the research on notification interruptions; the research on media multitasking; and evidence-based recommendations for study environment design, notification management, and deep work practice. The guide should be written for a non-academic student audience and should be practically actionable. Length: 2,000–2,500 words.