Cognitive Effects of Digital Technology Use in Young Adults: A Scoping Review
Cognitive Effects of Digital Technology Use in Young Adults: A Scoping Review

Summary/Abstract: Examining the cognitive effects of digital technology use in young adults will contribute to scientific knowledge and guide education and health. This scoping review aims to evaluate the cognitive effects of digital technology use in young adults as a result of the search conducted in DergiPark, Science Direct, Wiley Online Library, Medline Plus, DOAJ, PubMed, EBSCO, Scopus, Web of Science, IEEExplore, and ACM Digital Library databases without any time limitation. Twelve studies that meet the criteria were included in the review by the researchers. The included studies examined the cognitive effects of digital technology use in terms of memory, learning, and information processing in the included studies. Most studies showed that digital technology use creates adverse cognitive effects such as low recall accuracy, decreased neural activity in brain regions associated with memory, comprehension and transcribing issues about information, self-confidence problems during answering recall tests, forgetfulness about future events, and misinterpretation of the remembering process. According to the research findings, addiction to digital technology, trust in the process of recording information, cognitive effort shown in accessing and using information, and different methods used in recording information were determined as factors affecting the emergence of adverse cognitive effects. These results indicate that methodologically strong and comprehensive studies are necessary to understand the cognitive effects of digital technology use.

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