The ping or buzz of your phone letting you know a new message has arrived is hard to ignore. But it can spell trouble if you’re trying to focus on a task, according to new research to be published in the June issue of Computers in Human Behavior.
Research has found that whenever we receive a message notification, it interrupts our concentration for 7 seconds. It turns out that the type of information we see in the notification is also important. The more personal the notification, the greater the distraction.
“This disorder may arise in several ways, such as [a notification’s] the prominence of the mind, the condition that is acquired by repeated exposure, and the potential social value,” Hippolyte Fournier, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and first author of the study, told CNET.
While 7 seconds may not seem like a lot, we get a lot of notifications throughout the day, and those seconds can add up.
“We noticed that both the volume of notifications and how often people looked at their smartphones were linked to greater distraction,” Fournier said. “This pattern suggests that the different nature of smartphone use, rather than just the duration of use, may be an important factor in understanding how digital technology influences attentional processes.”
Attention to hijacking
The study used the Stroop task, a test that measures how quickly you can process information and how well you can focus. Colored words flashed on the screen to be tested. The font of each word has one color, but the text of the word has a different color. So the word “blue” may be written in a green font.
You should identify the color of the font and ignore the color the word describes. It’s a lot harder than it sounds. You can check for yourself using this YouTube video.
The researchers recruited 180 university students to conduct the study. The students were randomly divided into three groups. All students received a Stroop task, and notifications appeared on the screen as they completed the test. But the researchers slightly changed each group’s assessment.
The researchers told the first group that the screen was showing their own phones, so the students thought they were seeing their real notifications.
The second group saw popups on the screen that looked like real social media notifications, but the group knew they were fake. This has helped researchers examine how learned habits affect attention, independent of personal interactions.
A third group saw only dim notifications, with illegible text. The researchers used this experiment to determine how the interruption of unexpected pop-up viewing affected a group’s attention.
The notifications reduced students’ ability to process information by about 7 seconds in all three groups. But for readers who thought they were getting real notifications, the delay is more noticeable.
“While it is well documented that notifications can automatically capture attention, much less is understood about the cognitive processes that drive this attentional capture and the reasons why some people may be more vulnerable than others,” Fournier said. “Our goal was to gain a better understanding of both the underlying mechanisms and the individual differences that may account for this variation in sensitivity.”
Mental retardation
In the US, 90% of all people have smartphones, according to Pew Research, and a study by Harmony Healthcare IT found that we spend more than 5 hours a day using them. But how much time we spend on our phones may not matter as much as how often we check our notifications.
“In a lab study designed to simulate real-life notification exposure, we found that notification frequency and checking habits are more important than total screen time,” wrote Fabian Ringeval, one of the paper’s authors, in a LinkedIn post. “The more we interact with our phones, the more vulnerable our attention is to distraction.”
Anna Lembke, a professor of psychology at Stanford, told CNET that the study reflects what she’s seen in the clinical and research literature, “which is that the level of engagement — for example, how many notifications a person receives and how quickly they respond to notifications — is as great a predictor, or an even greater predictor, of harmful, problematic use than time spent.”
The researchers found that study participants received about 100 notifications per day. So the notifications we get on our phones can slow down our cognitive abilities with close distractions.
“In everyday situations that require sustained attention — like driving or reading — even a short deceleration can add up,” Ringval wrote. “Our findings suggest that improving digital well-being may not be about ‘using our phones less’ and more about reducing unnecessary distractions.”
Lembke said it is right to worry about how smartphone notifications affect our attention, “which is why children’s platforms should automatically mute notifications and make it difficult to refresh notifications without parental consent, and why adults should turn off notifications by choice to improve concentration and well-being, except in rare cases for safety reasons.”
