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It’s hard to ignore the ping or buzz on your phone that lets you know a new message has arrived. But that could mean trouble when it’s time to focus on a task, according to Word. New study Which will be published in the June issue of Computers in Human Behavior.
The study 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 also matters. The more personally relevant the notification, the greater the distraction.
“This disconnect likely arises from several mechanisms, such as perceptual salience (of the notice), conditioning acquired through repeated exposure, and potential social salience,” Hippolyte Fournier, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and first author of the study, told CNET.
Although 7 seconds may not seem like a long time, we receive a lot of notifications throughout the day, and those seconds can add up.
“We noticed that the volume of notifications and the number of times people checked their smartphones were associated with more churn,” Fournier said. “This pattern suggests that the fragmented nature of smartphone use, rather than just overall duration of use, may be a key factor in understanding how digital technologies influence attentional processes.”
Attention grabbing
The study used the Stroop test, which is a test that measures how quickly you process information and how well you can concentrate. Colored words flash across the screen for the test. The font of each word is one color, but the text of the word is a different color. So the word “blue” may be written in green font.
You should specify the font color and ignore the color that the word indicates. It’s much more difficult than it seems. You can do the test yourself Using this YouTube video.
The researchers recruited 180 college students for the study. The students were randomly divided into three groups. All students received the Stroop task, and notifications appeared on the screen when they completed the test. But the researchers changed the experiment slightly for each group.
The researchers told the first group that the screen was reflecting their personal phones, so the students thought they were seeing their real notifications.
The second group saw pop-ups on the screen that looked like real social media notifications, but the group knew they were false. This helped researchers test how learned habits affect attention, without any personal connection.
The third group only saw blurry notifications with illegible text. The researchers used this test to determine the extent to which the visual distraction of an unexpected pop-up affected the group’s attention.
The notifications slowed students’ ability to process information by about 7 seconds in all three groups. But for students who thought they were receiving real notifications, the delay was more noticeable.
“Although it is well documented that notifications can automatically capture attention, little is known about the cognitive processes that drive this attentional capture and the reasons why some people are more susceptible than others,” Fournier said. “Our goal was to gain a better understanding of both the underlying mechanisms and individual differences that could explain this variation in sensitivity.”
Brain lag
In the United States, 90% of people own a smartphone, according to Pew Research Center and Harmony Healthcare IT Study Found it We spend more than 5 hours a day using it. But how much time we spend on our phones may not be as important as how often we check our notifications.
In a laboratory study designed to mimic exposure to real-life notifications, we found that notification frequency and checking habits mattered more than total screen time, wrote Fabian Ringevall, one of the paper’s authors. Posted on LinkedIn. “The more we interact with our phones, the more vulnerable our attention becomes to interruption.”
Anna LembkeThe Stanford psychiatry professor told CNET that the study mirrors what she sees clinically and in the research literature, “namely, that level of engagement — for example the number of notifications a person receives and how quickly they respond to notifications — is a significant predictor, or even a greater predictor, of harmful and problematic use than time spent.”
The researchers found that study participants received about 100 notifications per day. So the notifications we receive on our phones can slow down our cognitive abilities through near-constant distraction.
“In everyday situations that require sustained attention — such as driving or learning — even short periods of deceleration can add up,” Ringevall wrote. “Our findings suggest that improving digital wellbeing may be less about ‘using our phones less’ and more about reducing unnecessary interruptions.”
It’s fair to worry about how smartphone notifications affect our attention, Lembke said, “which is why platforms for minors should silence notifications by default and make it difficult to reactivate notifications without parental consent, and why adults should optionally turn off notifications to improve focus and well-being, with rare exceptions for safety reasons.”