It may be worth managing your notifications so they pop up less often shironosov/Getty Images
Seeing notifications from social media apps seems to throw us off course for several seconds 鈥 even if we don鈥檛 open them.
at Lumi猫re University Lyon 2 in France has long been interested in understanding attention and how social media affects it. 鈥淚 feel impacted when I receive a notification from a social media app while I’m working,鈥 he says.
To learn more, Fournier and his colleagues asked 180 university students to complete a psychology test known as a Stroop task on a smartphone-sized screen. This measures how quickly someone can name the colour of a series of printed words that spell different colours, such as the word 鈥減urple鈥 written in green.
While the students carried out the task, social media notifications popped up, which they couldn鈥檛 open. Some were led to believe the alerts were their own, synced from their smartphones, while others weren鈥檛. A third group saw blurred alerts that couldn鈥檛 be read.
The researchers found that the participants who believed the notifications were real , 鈥渨hich makes sense, as they’re the ones with the most cognitive investment in what’s going on via their phone鈥, says neuroscientist , who wasn鈥檛 involved in the study.
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This group鈥檚 responses on the Stroop task were slowed about 7 seconds, on average, compared with when they did the task without a notification appearing. This was particularly the case among the participants who frequently checked their phones, based on screen time data gathered over the three weeks before the study.
Burnett says the study demonstrates that receiving a lot of notifications 鈥渃ompromises your ability to think鈥.
鈥淲e have top-down attention, which is consciously controlled, and bottom-up attention, which is instinctively controlled,鈥 he says. 鈥淯sually they balance out, but if something occurs that our senses deem significant, the bottom-up system immediately diverts resources, leaving less, if any, cognitive room for the thing we actually want to focus on, which means we get distracted.鈥
The scientists plan to do more research to better understand why notifications are so distracting and if this varies depending on the type of alert. For now, Fournier recommends people manage their notifications by turning them off and then only checking social media at set times of the day. 鈥淪everal studies have shown that turning off notifications was associated with a feeling of having more control over one’s attention in everyday life,鈥 he says.
The study has been published on , no DOI is available
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