The attentional cost of receiving a cell phone notification.

Abstract

It is well documented that interacting with a mobile phone is associated with poorer performance on concurrently performed tasks because limited attentional resources must be shared between tasks. However, mobile phones generate auditory or tactile notifications to alert users of incoming calls and messages. Although these notifications are generally short in duration, they can prompt task-irrelevant thoughts, or mind wandering, which has been shown to damage task performance. We found that cellular phone notifications alone significantly disrupted performance on an attention-demanding task, even when participants did not directly interact with a mobile device during the task. The magnitude of observed distraction effects was comparable in magnitude to those seen when users actively used a mobile phone, either for voice calls or text messaging.

Productive, anxious, lonely

“…This confirms a long history of findings that notifications interrupt [4,18,33] and have negative effects on task performance [1,4,10,11,16,18,21,23,27,30,39,38]. This strengthens the need for research about delivering notifications at opportune moments [16,29,30].…”

“…Since people usually attend to notifications within minutes, notifications may sometimes interrupt those other tasks. Such interruptions can have negative effects: previous work in the context of information workers has found that notifications negatively affect work efficiency when delivered in the middle of a work task [1,11,16,18,23,36,38], and the effect is more pronounced when the task is cognitively demanding [10,26]. As found by Stothart et al [38], this is even true when the notification is not attended, as tested in a controlled exam setting.…”

The channel capacity of visual awareness divided among multiple moving objects

“…The same limitations of awareness undoubtedly underlie interactions with information technology (Levin & Baker, 2015;Varakin et al, 2004), effects of distracted driving (McCarley et al, 2004;Strayer et al, 2003), and other forms of distraction (Eriksen & Johnson, 1964;Stothart et al, 2015).…”

Managing distractions to maintain focus on patients

“…Simply knowing that a text or an e-mail, for example, has been received can lead to a user's mind wandering. 6 These addictive behaviors and constant flow of information, as well as unclear boundaries regarding the use of smartphones in health care settings, are raising very serious concerns.…”