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Most people go through their days with an untold number of notifications popping up on their phones. It’s just become part of daily life. But should it be? A new study reveals that receiving a lot of phone notifications can actually compromise a person’s ability to think.
The study, conducted by Hippolyte Fournier, who has a Ph.D. in cognitive sciences, and his colleagues at Lumiere University Lyon 2 in France, took a look at how social media, and its associated barrage of notifications, affects a person’s attention. The study also attempted to discern why these phone notifications are so distracting and if the types of notifications one receives result in different responses.
“I feel impacted when I receive a notification from a social media app while I’m working,” New Scientist reports Fournier said about why he wanted to conduct this study.
The study’s methods and results
The study involved 180 university students completing a psychology test known as a Stroop task on a smartphone-sized screen. According to ScienceDirect, the Stroop Task, one of the best known psychological experiments, “is defined as a cognitive test where participants are required to identify the font color of color words while ignoring the words themselves, which can lead to delayed response times and increased cognitive workload due to the need for cognitive inhibition.”
Only in this case, while the students completed the test, they received social media notifications that they could not open. The students were broken up into three groups: those who believed the notifications had been synced from their own phones, those who were not told where the notifications were from, and a third group saw blurred notifications that they couldn’t read.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the group of students that were told the notifications came from their own phones were the most distracted. The students in that group took an average of about seven seconds longer than when they received no notifications while taking the test.
Fournier and his research team plan to conduct further studies, but for now, he recommends people turn off their notifications and only check social media at set times during the day. He makes this recommendation because, as he pointed out, “Several studies have shown that turning off notifications was associated with a feeling of having more control over one’s attention in everyday life.”