Is your smartphone making you dumb?

A new study in Computers in Human Behavior suggests that an over-reliance on smartphones may allow people to “offload” thinking to technology, resulting in lazier thinking. But the results of the study aren’t necessarily cause for alarm, argue Sabrina Golonka and Andrew Wilson.

Wilson and Golonka, who weren’t involved with the research, are psychology researchers at Leeds Beckett University. Their work investigates how we use resources in our environment—including our minds, bodies, and other objects—to solve tasks. “There’s nothing about smart phones that make them fundamentally different than a book for supporting analytical problem solving, other than the fact you tend to have the phone with you more often and it’s easier to find information,” argue Golonka and Wilson.

The authors of the Computers in Human Behavior paper argue otherwise, suggesting that because phones are a new and substantially different technology, they could be affecting our thinking in new ways.