Neural and Behavioral Evidence for a Link Between Mobile Technology Usage and Intertemporal Preference

Abstract

Mobile electronic devices such as smartphones are playing an increasingly pervasive role in our daily activities. A growing body of literature is beginning to investigate how mobile technology habits might relate to individual differences in cognitive traits. The present study is an investigation into how individual differences in intertemporal preference, impulse control, and reward sensitivity, are predictive of the degree to which people engage with their smartphones, in two separate experiments. Experiment 1 utilized behavioral and self-reported measures for each of the aforementioned cognitive traits to examine their relationships with Mobile Technology Engagement (MTE) as defined in Wilmer & Chein (2016). The results replicated earlier work demonstrating that mobile technology engagement is positively correlated with a tendency to discount delayed rewards. A positive relationship was also observed between MTE and reward sensitivity. In an attempt to investigate the neural origins of the relationship observed in Experiment 1, Experiment 2 examined the association between mobile technology usage and white matter connectivity from the ventral striatum (vSTR) to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), pathways that have been previously implicated as biological markers for individual differences in intertemporal preference. Regression analyses revealed that both pathways predicted delay discounting performance, but only vSTR-vmPFC predicted mobile technology engagement. Taken together, the results of these two experiments provide important foundational evidence for both neural and cognitive factors that predict how individuals engage with mobile technology.