Cellphone Notifications Major Distraction, Florida State Study Finds

Notifications on cellphones inevitably impair a person’s ability to focus on a given task, said a new Florida State University study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. “The level of how much it affected the task at hand was really shocking,” said Courtney Yehnert, an 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 paper 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.”