# Linking Phubbing Behavior to Self-Reported Attentional Failures and Media Multitasking
## 1 Introduction  
### Past Research  
Across the United States in 2019, nearly 81% of the total population owned a cell phone, 74% owned a desktop or laptop computer, and 52% owned a tablet [1]. In the same year, the average adult in the United States spent nearly 12 hours a day consuming media across these devices, which included but was not limited to watching television and movies, listening to music, browsing the internet, and playing video games [1]. Because the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has created a heightened reliance on the internet and technology [1], it is likely technology use and media consumption rates are much higher now than ever before. For many Americans, cell phones in particular are always present and turned on [2]. This has especially influenced social interactions. For instance, in a sample of over 3,000 adults in the United States in 2015, 89% reported that they used their phone at least once during their most recent social interaction despite the fact that 82% believed that phones can hurt a social interaction [2]. Though many Americans perceive technology use to be more harmful than helpful during social interactions, they still engage in such behavior. Thus, it is critical to understand how technology use behaviors are influenced by certain individual characteristics and can influence social experiences. One technology use behavior gaining interest within recent years is technoference, or technology interference, an intrusion that typically occurs in social interactions [3, 4, 5]. A manifestation of technoference is phubbing, which occurs when an individual uses their phone to snub a conversational partner [6, 7, 8, 9]. Because phubbing involves social interaction,it has most commonly been investigated in relation to psychosocial influences [10; 11]. Situational characteristics, such as the setting of the interaction (e.g., on public transit, at the dinner table) can predict phubbing behavior [11]. Certain personality traits and psychological characteristics can further predict who engages in this technoference behavior. Phubbing behavior is negatively associated with conscientiousness [12] and self-control [6], and is positively associated with trait boredom [10], trait anxiety and neuroticism [13], state and trait fear of missing out [6; 7; 13; 14], as well as sensation seeking [14]. Other dispositional factors, such as gender and age, have also been found to be associated with phubbing behavior [6; 8; 10; 13; 14]. While phubbing has been extensively investigated through social and personality frameworks, little is known about how this technoference behavior relates to cognition. This is surprising given the links between other phone use behaviors and cognition have been heavily explored [15; 16; 17; 18; 19]. Despite various social and personality researchers suggesting that phubbing is a multitasking behavior [10; 20; 21; 22], phubbing has not yet been fully and directly investigated through a cognitive framework. It is possible that phubbing can be characterized as a multitasking behavior because it involves attending to, or at least attempting to attend to, competing sources of information (i.e., a phone and a conversational partner) and performing multiple tasks (i.e., using a phone while engaging in a social interaction with a conversational partner) by dividing or shifting attention (i.e., dual tasking or task switching) [17; 23; 24]. Although multitasking behaviors can be investigated through social and personality frameworks, they can further be understood through a cognitive framework, particularly with a focus on attention. The negative association between phubbing and self-control [6], which is an aspect of inhibitory control, suggests that individuals who phub may have difficulty directing and maintaining their attention toward tasks because they struggle to regulate their behavior. Difficulty in directing and maintaining attention could manifest in different ways in terms of everyday attentional failures.