![]() In 2013, they recruited 212 undergraduate students at FSU to participate in an experiment. So even if you wait to respond until you finish what you’re working on, the fact that you’re aware of something waiting for you could be enough of a distraction to make you perform worse than you would had you not received a notification. This led the authors to think that an alert or notification could also cause cognitive load, because that buzzing might make you wonder about the content or source of the message. That’s why you’re not supposed to talk on the phone or text while you’re driving, and why many campaigns urge drivers to wait to respond until they’re no longer behind the wheel. Multitasking, for example, imposes a heavy cognitive load and hurts performance on a task, because our mental resources are finite and have to be allotted to discrete tasks. They knew from the literature on distracted driving that talking on the phone causes a cognitive load, which means it requires a certain amount of mental effort and working memory. “If we were driving and we felt a vibration for a phone call, that led us to think about the source of that call - who it could be, what the message was,” Stothart told me. The authors, Cary Stothart, Ainsley Mitchum, and Courtney Yehnert of Florida State University, became interested in the impact of these notifications after noticing that they themselves got distracted by them. It found that just being aware of an alert can hurt people’s performance on an attention-demanding task. ![]() A new piece of research, “The Attentional Cost of Receiving a Cell Phone Notification,” reports that the reverberations of new notifications can distract us, even when we don’t look over to see what they could be. But many people (including myself) might not realize just how beneficial switching from vibrate to silent can be. The familiar buzz buzz of a new notification is not as innocuous as it seems. But unless your phone is fully silenced or off, it’s probably still distracting you. This is why we put our phones screen-side down and slightly out of reach when we want to focus on something or show someone that we’re paying attention. By now we know that we’re (mostly) not supposed to multitask - that we can’t do two things at once very well and that it takes us a while to refocus when we switch from one task to another.
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