University students who spent four to five hours or more a day on their phones, mostly consuming online content, did worse than expected for their age on memory and attention tasks and reported poorer sleep, a team at Semmelweis University in Budapest found. The study, published in Acta Psychologica in 2025 and recirculated by ScienceDaily on Oct. 12, 2026, surveyed students aged 18 to 35.
The finding comes with a limit that the researchers themselves acknowledge: the design shows that heavy scrolling and weaker performance go together, not that one produces the other. The more interesting result is about who ends up in the heavy group and why: about a third of participants fell into it, and the study ties problematic use to weak self-control and fear of missing out rather than to personality alone.
Three ways of using a phone, and the one that stood out
Semmelweis researchers did not simply sort students by screen time. According to the university’s own announcement, issued on Jan. 21, 2026, the analysis separated three patterns. A “pure social” group used phones mainly to communicate and build social connections. A “light process” group spent under roughly four to five hours a day mixing social use, news, entertainment and passive scrolling. The “heavy process” group, about one-third of participants, spent four to five hours or more a day, mostly on content rather than on direct contact with other people.
It was the heavy process group that stood out. Its members performed worse on attention and memory tasks than would be expected for their age, reported poorer sleep, described a stronger need for constant new stimulation, and had more trouble resisting the urge to check or act on their phones immediately. The ScienceDaily summary describes the pattern as linked to poorer memory, reduced concentration and disrupted sleep.
Participants completed online questionnaires about how much they used their phones, what they did on them, whether phone use had made them miss planned activities, and whether they kept thinking about the phone when not using it. Self-control, fear of missing out and neuroticism were measured as well, along with cognitive performance and physical measures such as posture and balance.
Self-control and fear of missing out, not personality alone
Dr. Johanna Takács, a senior research fellow in Semmelweis University’s Faculty of Health Sciences and the study’s lead researcher, said that personality alone, such as a high level of neuroticism, does not make someone addicted to their phone. Problematic use was instead closely tied to weak self-control and a strong fear of missing out, often shortened to FOMO. Takács put the emphasis on behavior in remarks carried by SciTechDaily: “What really matters is how well they can control their behavior, emotions, and impulses.” Beáta Seregély, the assistant lecturer who handled the physical measurements, said the effects are not limited to phone use but can also influence everyday movements. That distinction is built into the paper’s title, which describes a parallel mediation of FoMO and self-control on the relationship between problematic smartphone use and neuroticism, as listed under its DOI.
Total time on the device told a slightly different story. Usage time was more closely linked to physical effects than to the cognitive ones, and the team pointed to forward head posture, sometimes called text neck, as a possible contributor to neck strain, balance problems and slower reaction time. The ScienceDaily account labels these effects as possible rather than proven, and the posture findings should be read with that word in mind.
What a cross-sectional survey of students can and cannot show
The ScienceDaily page does not report how many students took part, but a separate write-up in StudyFinds says 225 Hungarian university students remained after incomplete responses were removed, with an average age of 22.5 and about 61% female. It adds that the voluntary online survey ran from April to July 2024 using convenience sampling, and that the design was cross-sectional, so data were collected at one point in time and cannot establish cause and effect.
That matters for the memory and sleep result. A student who sleeps badly may scroll more at night, and a student who struggles with attention may reach for the phone more often; a survey taken once cannot tell which way the arrow points. Phone use was also self-reported, which leaves room for error in recalled hours. StudyFinds quotes the authors’ own note that future longitudinal research would be better suited to test that temporal sequence, and the convenience sample is narrow in age and background, which limits how far the results generalize.
The researchers’ practical suggestions follow from the self-control and FOMO findings rather than from any proof of harm: cut unnecessary notifications, limit social media browsing, keep phones out of the bedroom before sleep, build self-control through behavioral training or psychological support, and keep up posture work and physical activity. Those are recommendations from the study team, and the study did not test whether following them improves memory or sleep.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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