The Effects of Spontaneous Use of Smartphone on the Attention and Emotions of Millennials Students in a Classroom

With the access of the millennials to the contents of the internet through their smartphones, a new educommunicative ecosystem emerges that favors communication through immediacy and interactivity. This research seeks to know the habitual and spontaneous use of millennial smartphone during an on-campus class at the university. Experimental research has been used, using neuroscientific techniques of electrodermia, to measure the attention of subjects and their emotions at the group level, as well as a complementary quantitative questionnaire. The experiment was carried out with 44 people distributed in the two groups with 22 subjects in each one (experimental group and control group), with ages between 20 and 21 years of age of both sexes (in a similar proportion). 45% said they use the smartphone in class to chat, 29% to enter social networks and 5% indicated the use of the smartphone to take photos. 21% said they never use the smartphone in class. Regarding the neuroscientific experiment there was an increase in attention in the session in which the use of smartphone was prohibited. The students declare that they have smartphone usage patterns in the classroom similar to those they have outside the classroom. There were no significant differences in the duration and average intensity of attention and emotion between the experimental group and the control group.