The Smartphone Effect: How Is It Influencing Museum Visits?

The Visit Nobody Talks About

You walk in, scan the QR code, and try to download the app. You adjust the settings, see that your battery is at 34%, and then get an unexpected notification. Suddenly, when you’re standing in front of a Vermeer… your phone is dead, and you’re left asking yourself what just happened.

That is one of many real-world Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) situations. Not the tidy version everyone expects, but the actual one happening at the door, before the visit even starts. This situation is not just annoying for the visitor; it also makes the experience measurably worse, at a cognitive level that most museum professionals are not even aware of.

To understand how this is more common than we imagine, we’ll briefly highlight three interconnected research areas that show how the cultural sector is increasingly being affected and why we should already be rethinking visitors’ experiences during a cultural visit.

Your Phone Is Draining Attention Even When You Are Not Looking at It

In 2017, researchers across the University of Texas at Austin, UC San Diego, and Disney Research ran two experiments with nearly 800 smartphone users to test one specific idea: does the mere presence of a smartphone—not using it, not getting notifications, just having it nearby—reduce cognitive performance?

Cognitive capacity is the amount of mental bandwidth a person has for thinking and concentrating at any given time. When researchers examined whether having a smartphone impacted a person’s ability to think and focus, the answer was yes. Even when participants’ phones were turned face down on the desk or switched off entirely, available cognitive capacity was significantly lower than in participants who had left their phones in a different room. The more visible and accessible the device was, the worse the cognitive performance was.

Your conscious mind isn’t thinking about your smartphone, but the process of requiring yourself not to think about something uses up some of your limited cognitive resources. It’s a brain drain.

Adrian F. Ward et al., Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2017

The researchers also found that the cognitive cost was highest among people who reported the strongest dependence on their phones—which, to be fair, is most adults nowadays. So, when a visitor walks through a museum with their phone in their pocket, their brain is already working extra hard to keep it there.

Capturing More, but Remembering Less

Linda Henkel at Fairfield University designed a study in which participants were guided on a tour of an art museum. One group photographed the objects they saw. The other just looked at them.

Visitors who photographed each object as a whole remembered significantly fewer objects, fewer details about them, and even fewer of their locations in the museum. Whole-object photography impaired memory across the board. Henkel called it the “photo-taking impairment effect.”

These results show how the mind’s eye and the camera’s eye are not the same… people may take photos as a way to remember, but it can actually interfere with remembering.

Linda A. Henkel, Psychological Science, 2014

This is based on a well-known idea called cognitive offloading: the use of physical action to alter the information processing requirements of a task to reduce cognitive demand. In simple terms, when we delegate memory to a device, we also delegate the cognitive processing that creates that memory. The camera will hold the image, but the brain might not.

Henkel’s study also revealed an important nuance. When participants photographed specific details rather than entire objects, the memory impairment disappeared. The finding suggests that the problem may not simply be taking a photograph, but how we engage with the experience while doing so. Photographing an entire object can encourage us to capture the moment and move on, while photographing a specific detail requires us to look closely, decide what matters, and engage more deliberately with what we are seeing.

Technology Can Reduce Attention—or Direct It

Technology can reduce attention, but it can also direct it. The question is what technology asks visitors to do. Is it encouraging them to look, listen, interpret, and engage, or simply allowing them to capture the experience for later?

Grinschgl and colleagues conducted additional experiments directly testing the trade-off between offloading and memory formation. Their conclusion was that cognitive offloading boosts task performance in the moment but consistently diminishes what is actually remembered afterward. So, in the end, if you want to get the photo, you might lose part of the memory.

Those hundreds of photos on someone’s camera roll from their museum visit are not necessarily a record of deep engagement. The camera stepped in, so the brain did not have to, and what gets left behind is exactly what a museum is supposed to give people: a real memory of their visit.

People Know Their Phones Are Problematic, but They Can’t Stop Using Them

Beyond the lab research, there is a more human-scale insight worth reflecting on. In a nationally representative survey of 1,453 U.S. teenagers, 38% reported spending too much time on their smartphones. Around 44% said they feel anxious when their phone is not nearby.

Teenagers are the heaviest smartphone users on the planet—and they are fully aware that the relationship is complicated. If they self-report that their phone use is excessive, what does that say about a museum asking visitors, adults and kids alike, to use the same device as their primary interpretation tool?

Museums are ideal places to slow down, pay attention, and take something in. Every exhibition is a carefully constructed invitation to be present. And then a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategy hands visitors the one object most scientifically engineered to undermine presence.

So What Does This Actually Mean for Museums?

• Smartphones reduce cognitive capacity even when inactive.
• Taking photos with them could impair the memories visitors come to form.
• People are already aware, at some level, that their phones are pulling them away from the present moment.

Museums do not need visitors to have perfect recall of every object. But they do want visitors to leave with something: a feeling, a memory, and a connection to a story. After taking into consideration the three previous research studies, we can determine that Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) actively works against that goal, quietly and invisibly, while visitors think they are “engaging.”

Since we began working in the cultural sector about 18 years ago, we’ve observed how the needs of cultural venues have evolved in response to visitor experience demands. However, we’ve also noticed that the overwhelming influx of digital screens has reached a limit. This digital bombardment causes cultural venues to overlook a crucial aspect: visitor attention. Visitors may be present, but are they truly absorbing the information they receive?

As a tech company, we’ve realized it’s time to slow down and focus on fundamentals: less is more. That’s why we believe in the impact a dedicated device can have. No apps to install, no notifications, no battery worries, no decisions to make. Visitors simply pick it up, listen, and become part of the story. Their phone remains in the bag, out of sight and away from their thoughts entirely.

It is a small shift during the visit. But based on what we previously learned in the research, it represents a significant cognitive effect.

References

1. Brain drain: the mere presence of one’s own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity. Ward, A. F., Duke, K., Gneezy, A., and Bos, M. W. (2017). Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2(2), pp. 140–154. doi.org/10.1086/691462
2. Point-and-shoot memories: the influence of taking photos on memory for a museum tour. Henkel, L. A. (2014). Psychological Science, 25(2), pp. 396–402. doi.org/10.1177/0956797613504438
3. Cognitive offloading. Risko, E. F., and Gilbert, S. J. (2016). Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20(9), pp. 676–688. doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2016.07.002
4. Consequences of cognitive offloading: boosting performance but diminishing memory. Grinschgl, S., Papenmeier, F., and Meyerhoff, H. S. (2021). Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74(9), pp. 1477–1496. doi.org/10.1177/17470218211008060
5. How teens and parents approach screen time. Anderson, M., Faverio, M., and Park, E. (2024). Pew Research Center national survey of 1,453 U.S. teens ages 13–17, conducted Sept.–Oct. 2023. pewresearch.org/internet/2024/03/11/how-teens-and-parents-approach-screen-time/