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This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkin. This will just take a minute.

Well, did you see the thing about why people on cell phones are so annoying?

I know, right? Because you only hear...

Oohp, I gotta go. Sorry. I know that was irritating. Because a recent study in the journal Psychological Science shows that overhearing only half of a cell phone conversation is much more distracting than listening to two people chat.

When we follow a full conversation, we tend to fill in the blanks…anticipating what each of the speakers might say. But when we’re limited to just one side of a dialogue—or “halfalogue”—our brains have to work harder to guess what’s coming next. That unpredictability grabs our attention, which makes these partial exchanges hard to tune¹ out.

Psychologists had volunteers perform tasks that required concentration. And while the subjects worked, they were treated to either a dialogue or halfalogue the scientists had previously² recorded. The results: hearing just the “tete” in a cell phone tete-a-tete leads to poor performance in other tasks.

And that suggests that [phone rings]

Can you excuse me? Hello? Yah, I’m just recording³ it now.

Thanks for the minute for Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkin.