Your Phone Pinging Hijacks Your Brain for 7 Seconds, Study Finds

The slight ping or buzz on your phone that lets you know a new message has arrived is hard to ignore. But it can cause problems when it’s time to focus on a task, according to a new study to be published in the June issue of the journal Computers in Human Behavior.

The study found that every time we receive a message notification, it interrupts our concentration for 7 seconds. It turns out that the type of information we see in the notification also matters. The more personally relevant the notification, the greater the distraction.

“This interruption likely results from several mechanisms, such as [a notification’s] perceptual importance, conditioning acquired through repeated exposure, and possible social significance,” Hippolyte Fournier, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and first author of the study, told CNET.

Although 7 seconds may not seem like much, we receive many notifications throughout the day, and those seconds can add up.

“We observed that the volume of notifications and the frequency with which individuals check their smartphones were linked to greater disruptions,” Fournier said. “This trend suggests that the fragmented nature of smartphone use, rather than just total duration of use, could be a key factor in understanding how digital technologies influence attentional processes.”

Diversion of attention

The study used a Stroop task, a test that measures how quickly you can process information and your ability to concentrate. Colorful words flash on a screen for the test. The font of each word is one color, but the text of the word is a different color. So the word “blue” could be written in green characters.

You need to identify the color of the font and ignore the color indicated by the word. It’s a lot harder than it seems. You can take the test yourself using this YouTube video.

The researchers recruited 180 university students for the study. The students were randomly divided into three groups. All students were given a Stroop task and notifications appeared on screen when they completed the test. But the researchers modified the experiment slightly for each group.

The researchers told the first group that the screen mirrored that of their home phone, so the students thought they were seeing their real notifications.

The second group saw pop-ups on the screen that looked like real social media notifications, but the group knew they were fake. This helped researchers test the impact of learned habits on attention, without personal relevance.

The third group only saw blurry notifications, with unreadable text. The researchers used this test to determine how the visual distraction of an unexpected pop-up affected the group’s attention.

The notifications slowed students’ ability to process information by about 7 seconds in all three groups. But for students who thought they would receive real notifications, the delay was more pronounced.

“While it is well established that notifications can automatically capture attention, much less is understood about the cognitive processes that lead to this attentional capture and why some people may be more susceptible than others,” Fournier said. “Our goal was to better understand both the underlying mechanisms and the individual differences that could explain this variability in sensitivity.”

Brain delay

In the United States, 90% of the population owns a smartphone, according to Pew Research, and a Harmony Healthcare IT study found that we spend more than 5 hours a day using them. But how much time we spend on our phone may not matter as much as how often we check our notifications.

“In a lab study designed to mimic real-world exposure to notifications, we found that notification frequency and checking habits mattered more than total screen time,” Fabian Ringeval, another author of the paper, wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “The more we interact with our phones, the more vulnerable our attention becomes to interruptions.”

Anna Lembke, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford, told CNET that the study reflects what she sees in the clinic and in the research literature, “that the level of engagement — for example, the number of notifications a person receives and how quickly they respond to notifications — is as important, or even more important, a predictor of harmful and problematic use than time spent.”

The researchers found that study participants received about 100 notifications per day. So the notifications we receive on our phones could be slowing down our cognitive abilities due to near-constant distraction.

“In everyday situations that require continuous attention – like driving or learning – even short slowdowns can add up,” Ringeval wrote. “Our findings suggest that improving digital well-being is less about ‘using our phones less’ and more about reducing unnecessary interruptions.”

Lembke said it’s fair to be concerned about the impact of smartphone notifications on our attention, “which is why platforms aimed at minors should turn off notifications by default and make it difficult to turn notifications back on without parental consent, and why adults should turn off notifications voluntarily to improve their concentration and well-being, with rare exceptions for safety reasons.”