Smartphone notifications may hamper your work: study

All those Facebook and email notifications you get on your smartphone are increasing your chances of committing mistakes in a task, a new study  suggests.  Just receiving a simple notification on your cellphone  can cause enough of a distraction to impair your ability to  focus on a given task, researchers said.  The distraction caused by a notification - whether it is  a sound or a vibration - is comparable to the effects seen  when users actively use their cell phones to make calls or send text messages, they said. 

"The level of how much it affected the task at hand was  really shocking," said Courtney Yehnert, a Florida State  University (FSU) research coordinator.  "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," the researchers said.  "Cellular phone notifications alone significantly disrupt  performance on an attention-demanding task, even when  participants do not directly interact with a mobile device  during the task," they said. 

The study underscores that simply being aware of a missed call or text can have the same effect.  The findings are significant because many public  information campaigns intend to deter problematic cellphone  use - while driving, for example - often emphasise waiting to  respond to messages and calls. However, even waiting may take a toll on attention,  according to the researchers. Simply remembering to perform  some action in the future is sufficient to disrupt performance  on an unrelated concurrent task. The researchers compared the performance of participants  on an attention-demanding computer task, which was divided  into two parts. 

In the first part, participants were asked simply to  complete the task. During the second part, although they were  not aware of it, participants were randomly assigned to one of  three groups: call, text or no notification. Automated calls and texts were then sent to the personal  phones of participants in the first two groups without their  knowledge that the notifications were coming from the  researchers. 

Overall, the researchers found that participants who  received notifications made more mistakes on the computer task  than those who didn't.  In fact, the increase in the probability of making a  mistake was more than three times greater for those who  received notifications, researchers said.  Those who received phone call notifications fared worse  on the task than those who received a text alert. The research suggests that receiving a notification but  not responding is as distracting as actually answering the  phone or replying to a text.  The study was published in the Journal of Experimental  Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.