They may be worth managing to reduce interruptions from notifications
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Observing notifications from a social media platform indicates they can distract us for a few moments, even without opening them.
Hippolyte Fournier, from Lumiere University Lyon 2 in France, has been keen to study the impact of attention and social media. “Notifications from a social media app during work hours certainly affected my concentration,” he shares.
To delve deeper, Fournier and his team engaged 180 university students in a psychology exercise known as the Stroop task on smartphone-sized screens. This task evaluates how swiftly individuals can identify colors presented in words, such as the word “red” displayed in blue.
During the task, a social media notification appeared but could not be interacted with. Some participants were led to think these alerts were from their own devices, while others were not aware. A third group encountered blurry, illegible notifications.
The researchers suggested that the valid notifications were the most disruptive to the participants, as they proved to be the most distracting of the three conditions, notes neuroscientist Dean Burnett, who did not participate in the study.
Participants in this group took, on average, about 7 seconds longer to complete the Stroop tasks compared to when no notifications were present. This delay was particularly noted among those who frequently utilized their phones, as indicated by screen time data collected three weeks prior to the study.
Burnett comments that the findings suggest an overload of notifications “hinders your cognitive capacity.”
“We have two types of attention: one that is consciously guided and another that is instinctively responsive,” he explains. “Normally, they are in harmony, but when something grabs our attention, the instinctual response can redirect resources and diminish the mental space needed for our current focus, thus serving as a distraction.”
Researchers plan to investigate further to understand why notifications are so distracting and whether the effects vary with different types of alerts. For the time being, Fournier advises people to manage their notifications by disabling them and checking social media at designated times. “Some studies indicate that turning off notifications can enhance a person’s control over their attention in daily life,” he notes.
This research is available in psyarxiv, although a DOI is not yet assigned.
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Source: www.newscientist.com
