Measuring the Effects of Stress on Mobile Interaction

Research shows that environmental factors such as ambient noise and cold ambience can render users situationally impaired, adversely affecting interaction with mobile devices. However, an internal factor which is known to negatively impact cognitive abilities -- stress -- has not been systematically investigated in terms of its impact on mobile interaction. In this paper, we report a study where we use the Trier Social Stress Test to induce stress on participants, and investigate its effect on three aspects of mobile interaction: target acquisition, visual search, and text entry. We find that stress reduces completion time and accuracy during target acquisition tasks, as well as completion time during visual search tasks. Finally, we are able to directly contrast the magnitude of these effects to previously published effects of environmentally-caused impairments. Our work contributes to the growing body of literature on situational impairments.