The soft ping or buzz on your phone that lets you know a new message has arrived is hard to ignore. But it can mean trouble when it’s time to concentrate on a task, according to a new study that will be published in the June issue of the journal Computers in Human Behavior.
The study found that whenever we receive a message notification, it interrupts our concentration for 7 seconds. It turns out that the type of information that we see in the notification also matters. The more personally relevant the notification, the larger the distraction.
“This interruption likely arises from several mechanisms, such as [a notification’s] perceptual prominence, the conditioning acquired through repeated exposure, and the possible social significance,” Hippolyte Fournier, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and the study’s first author, told CNET.
While 7 seconds may not seem like much, we get a lot of
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