You know that phone calls are distracting. But did you know that texts—or even just the knowledge that you’ve received one—can disrupt your attention and affect your performance?
In a recent study, participants who received text notifications made three times as many errors on a task as those who received none, according to research from Florida State University.
“At the outset, we were not sure that we would even get a measurable effect, because most of the research looks at people picking the phone up and looking at it,” says Ainsley Mitchum, one of the study’s authors who now works on traffic safety research for the state of California. “People think it’s sufficient to just ignore the phone, and I think this finding suggests that it’s harder to ignore than people realize.”
Mitchum and one of his co-authors, cognitive psychology grad student Cary Stothart, had the idea to run this experiment based on their own experiences. “We had both noticed that if we were reading a demanding academic title or trying to do some programming work, even if we knew a notification had come in, our concentration was trashed,” Mitchum says. “You really couldn’t think about what you were doing until you knew one way or another what that was. It causes you to be thinking about things other than what you’re doing.”
In the test, undergraduate students all performed a Sustained Attention to Response Task, or SART. They watched numbers flash on a computer screen at a rate of one number per second, and they had to press the space bar every time they saw a number unless it was the number “3.” Then they were supposed to do nothing. “It’s called the ‘Oops' task,” Mitchum says. “If you aren’t paying attention, you will hit the space bar whenever the ‘3’ comes up. Oops.”
(Photo credit: Jhaymesisviphotography)
After researchers had recorded a baseline performance, students were randomly divided into three groups and performed the task again. One group received phone calls on their cell phones, one group received texts and the third group received neither. Everyone made more mistakes in the second round of the SART—“It’s boring, your attention drifts,” Mitchum says—but the students who received text notifications were three times as likely to make an error as the group who got no phone calls or texts.
The phone call group also saw increased mistakes—four times as many as the control group—but Mitchum credits that number partially to the age of the participants. “To some extent, that has to do with our subject population, which was younger college students,” Mitchum says. “For that group, they don’t usually get phone calls unless it’s something very important. It’s uncommon, so they might have found it more anxiety producing. The effect is smaller for text messages.”
This is obviously important for drivers to know, but also notable for anyone who’s trying to concentrate on a work task or other activity. Phone notifications can really affect your productivity and even your execution of a job.
“We found that people who demand a lot of themselves already have a sense of this and recognize that when they’re studying for a difficult exam they need to not only put the phone on vibrate but put it out of sight,” Mitchum says. “So it can’t flash. Sometimes when mine is on silent, you can still see the little LED flashing on the front of it.”
In other words, if you’re doing something that requires your total attention, make sure you’re in an environment that is quiet and free of distractions—even text vibrations. “Distractions where your mind is somewhere else are a little bit more insidious,” Mitchum says, “because you may not realize immediately that that’s what’s happening.”
