The authors explore patterns of smartphone use during the first weeks following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in Belgium, focusing on citizens’ use of smartphones to consume news and to communicate and interact with others. Unique smartphone tracking data from 2,778 Flemish adults reveal that at the height of the outbreak, people used their smartphone on average 45 minutes (28 percent) more than before the outbreak. The number of smartphone pickups remained fairly stable over this period. This means that on average, users did not turn to their smartphones more frequently but used them longer to access news (54 percent increase), social media apps (72 percent increase), messaging apps (64 percent increase), and the voice call feature (44 percent increase). These smartphone use patterns suggest that smartphones are key instruments that help citizens stay informed, in sync, and in touch with society during times of crisis.

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The ever-connected world created by smartphones has led to initiatives like a 'digital detox', in which smartphone users consciously disconnect from email, social media and internet in general for a certain period of time. Since research based on subjective self-reports indicates that extensive smartphone usage and stress are often related, we checked whether a digital detox is effectively associated with a decrease in stress in the short-term and whether this could be measured with objective markers of both smartphone usage and physiological stress. More particularly, we monitored participants for two consecutive weeks: one week of normal smartphone usage and one week of digital detox. We asked them to continuously wear a state-of-the-art wristband device, measuring physiological stress based on skin conductance (SC). In addition, we developed an app called 'mobileDNA' to capture detailed information on which apps participants use throughout the day and how much time they spend on them. Although this was a pilot study with a rather low sample size, we found decreased levels of stress during a digital detox week. This finding provides evidence that a digital detox can be an interesting coping mechanism for people experiencing problematic smartphone usage and that further and more extensive research with our methodology has a lot of potential in the future.

In a recent issue of Consciousness and Cognition, Filbrich, Torta, Vanderclausen, Azanon, and Legrain (2016) commented on a paper in which we used a tactile Temporal Order Judgment (TOJ) task to show that expecting pain on a specific body location biased attention to that location (Vanden Bulcke, Crombez, Durnez, & Van Damme, 2015). Their main criticism is that the effects are likely to reflect response bias rather than genuine attentional bias. We agree that the TOJ task used may be susceptible to response bias, and welcome the authors' methodological suggestions to control for such bias. However, we feel that certain aspects of our work are misrepresented in their paper. Most importantly, we contest their argument that our instructions made the threat location task-relevant, thereby increasing risk of response bias. Further, we reply to other methodological and theoretical issues raised by these authors.

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Human operators in the upcoming Industry 4.0 workplace will face accelerating job demands such as elevated cognitive complexity. Unobtrusive objective measures of mental workload (MWL) are therefore in high demand as indicated by both theory and practice. This pilot study explored the wearability and external validity of pupillometry, a MWL measure robustly validated in laboratory settings and now deployable in work settings demanding operator mobility. In an ecologically valid work environment, 21 participants performed two manual assemblies-one of low and one of high complexity-while wearing eye-tracking glasses for pupil size measurement. Results revealed that the device was perceived as fairly wearable in terms of physical and mental comfort. In terms of validity, no significant differences in mean pupil size were found between the assemblies even though subjective mental workload differed significantly. Exploratory analyses on the pupil size when attending to the assembly instructions only, were inconclusive. The present work suggests that current lab-based procedures might not be adequate yet for in-the-field mobile pupillometry. From a broader perspective, these findings also invite a more nuanced view on the current validity of lab-validated physiological MWLmeasures when applied in real-life settings. We therefore conclude with some key insights for future development of mobile pupillometry.