手机真的会榨干人类大脑吗？(中)

That’s Doug Parry, a lecturer at Stellenbosch University, who studies socioinformatics and who did the meta-analysis—a study in which data from multiple published papers are combined together and reanalyzed.

这是斯坦林布什大学的讲师道格·帕里，他的研究领域是社会信息学，这项元分析也是他的研究。元分析是指将多篇刊发论文的数据进行整合并重新分析的研究方法。

Parry became interested in brain drain first from studying multitasking and then from investigating something called “online vigilance…”

帕里对认知流失开始感兴趣，是因为他起初研究了多任务处理，然后研究了一种名为“在线警觉……”的东西。

…which is essentially this idea that we’re constantly aware of the online world, the mobile world around us.

本质上，这个概念是说我们会不断意识到网络世界和我们周围的移动世界。

We’re thinking, we’re ruminating about, you know, the news cycle, the—our friends and family that we can connect to through our—through our phone, and so on.

我们在思考，我们在反复思考，包括循环播放的新闻、可以通过手机取得联系的朋友和家人等等。”

Parry’s work on "online vigilance" led him to wonder how strong brain drain’s effects really are.

帕里对“在线警觉”的研究让他想知道认知流失的影响到底有多严重。

I saw that there’s a need to kind of bring together the sort of 20 to 30 studies that have been conducted over the last—it’s about seven or eight years—on this phenomenon,

我发现有必要把先前关于这一现象的二三十项研究整合起来，这些研究大概跨时7到8年,

and see across the studies “What do we actually know about the so-called brain drain hypothesis?” and, that is, “It’s a meaningful effect? Is it a consistent effect?”

纵览这些研究，看看“我们到底了解认知流失假说什么?”，换言之，“这会是一个有意义的影响? 这会是一个持续的影响吗?”

Past studies on brain drain looked primarily at five cognitive functions: working memory, sustained attention, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility and fluid intelligence.

先前关于认知流失的研究主要关注五种认知功能: 工作记忆、持续性注意力、抑制性控制、认知灵活性和流体智力。

Parry lumped together data for each of these functions individually and then did a sixth analysis where he looked at all the results together.

帕里先把这五个认知功能的数据单独放在一起看，之后，他在第六次分析中又把所有结果放在一起看。

In the end, he looked at 56 effect sizes on how phones affect our minds from 27 studies in 25 publications.

最后，他找出25份刊发论文中的27项研究，并对56种关于手机多大程度会影响大脑的研究进行了分析。

So looking at the five separate analyses–of the five, the only statistically significant result was for working memory.

阅览这五种不同认知功能的分析，唯一有统计学意义的研究结果是工作记忆。

Whereas for the other four cognitive functions, no statistically significant effects of the presence of a smartphone were found across the various effects included in those analyses.

而其他四种认知功能的统计学结果并不显著，在这些影响研究中，暂未发现智能手机的存在对认知功能有统计学上的显著影响。

And that is somewhat consistent with Ward and colleagues.

这项研究结果在某种程度上与沃德团队是一致的。

So they found a negative effect for working memory, but they didn’t find a negative effect for sustained attention.

他们发现手机的存在对工作记忆有负面影响，但他们尚未发现这对持续性注意力有负面影响。

Though it is similar to what Ward found, Parry’s analysis also revealed the impact on working memory was much smaller than initial studies indicated.

虽然这与沃德的发现相似，但帕里的分析还表明，对工作记忆的影响要比最初研究指出的要小得多。

I think the important difference here with this meta-analysis, compared to the Ward 2017 paper, is the magnitude of the effect.

我认为，与沃德2017年的论文相比，元分析重要的差异在影响大小上。

This matters because it can tell us whether our phones are completely diverting our attention by their mere presence or simply affecting one aspect of our cognition slightly.

这一点很重要，因为影响大小能够表明，仅仅把手机放一边就可以完全转移我们的注意力，还是只是略微影响了我们认知的某一方面。