A new Florida State University study shows that simply receiving a cell phone notification — whether a ringtone, an alarm chime, or a vibration — can be enough to distract people and reduce their ability to concentrate on a task.
Researchers found that the attentional disruption caused by a notification, even when the phone is not actively used, can be as large as the distraction caused by making a call or sending a text. The study, titled “The Attentional Cost of Receiving a Cell Phone Notification,” appears in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.
Lead author Cary Stothart, a psychology doctoral student, and co-authors Ainsley Mitchum and Courtney Yehnert (an FSU research coordinator who began the work as an undergraduate) report that notifications prompt task-irrelevant thoughts — a form of mind-wandering — which in turn harms performance on attention-demanding tasks.
“The level of how much it affected the task at hand was really shocking,” Yehnert said, reflecting on the surprisingly large effect the team observed.
The study builds on well-established findings that actively using a mobile phone while performing another task divides attention and impairs performance. What sets this research apart is that it isolates the effect of receiving a notification when participants do not intentionally interact with their phones. The results indicate that awareness of a missed call or text alone is sufficient to disrupt concurrent cognitive performance.
To test this, participants completed an attention-demanding computer task that was divided into two parts. In the first part, participants completed the task without interruption. During the second part, participants were unaware that they had been randomly assigned to receive either an automated phone call notification, a text notification, or no notification at all. The automated notifications were sent to the participants’ personal phones without indicating they were part of the experiment.
Overall, those who received a notification were significantly more likely to make mistakes on the attention task than those who did not receive any alerts. The probability of making an error more than tripled for participants who were notified, and call alerts produced a larger negative effect on performance than text alerts.
When the authors compared their results to prior research that examined the effects of actively using a phone, they found similar magnitudes of distraction. This suggests that receiving a notification but not responding can be as disruptive as engaging in a phone call or replying to a message, at least for tasks that require sustained attention.
Although the FSU experiment did not involve driving, the implications for road safety are clear. Even a brief lapse in attention while operating a vehicle can produce dangerous, potentially life-threatening consequences. “When driving, it’s impossible to know when ‘the wrong time’ will occur,” Stothart said. “Our results suggest that it is safest for people to mute or turn off their phones and put them out of sight while driving.”
The researchers plan follow-up work that will examine how notifications affect attention during simulated driving. That study will help clarify how notification-induced mind-wandering translates into real-world driving performance and crash risk.
Source: Cary Stothart – Florida State University
Image Credit: The image is in the public domain
Original Research: Abstract for “The Attentional Cost of Receiving a Cell Phone Notification” by Stothart, Cary; Mitchum, Ainsley; and Yehnert, Courtney in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. Published online June 29 2015 doi:10.1037/xhp0000100
Abstract
The Attentional Cost of Receiving a Cell Phone Notification
Previous work has shown that active interaction with a mobile phone harms performance on concurrent tasks because attention must be shared. Mobile phones also produce auditory or tactile notifications that briefly call attention to incoming calls and messages. Although these notifications are short-lived, they can trigger task-irrelevant thoughts and mind-wandering, which degrade task performance. This study found that receiving cell phone notifications alone, even when participants did not interact with their devices, significantly disrupted performance on an attention-demanding task. The size of this distraction was comparable to effects observed when users actively used their phones for calls or texts.
“The Attentional Cost of Receiving a Cell Phone Notification” by Stothart, Cary; Mitchum, Ainsley; and Yehnert, Courtney in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. Published online June 29 2015 doi:10.1037/xhp0000100