No Evidence that Smartphone Notifications Lead to Goal-Neglect

Abstract

These days, young people report to be in a state of permanent alertness due to their smartphones. This state has been defined as smartphone vigilance, an awareness that one can always get connected to others in combination with a permanent readiness to respond to incoming smartphone notifications. We argue that receiving a notification makes users vigilant and activates goals (e.g., checking the message) that interfere with other goals needed to perform a task. We thus hypothesized that smartphone vigilance impairs maintenance of current task-goals in working memory, resulting in increased goal-neglect. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a preregistered experiment that examined the effect of smartphone vigilance (incoming notifications) on goal-neglect in a modified Stroop task. We found evidence that participants perceived notifications as distracting, but vigilance did not lead to increased goal-neglect. To the contrary, there was tentative evidence that vigilant participants performed better at the task.

Caught in the moment: Are there person-specific associations between momentary procrastination and passively measured smartphone use?

“…Evidence on the distracting potential of notifications is mixed, however. It should be noted that whereas ample studies indicate notifications have an attentional cost (e.g., Stothart et al, 2015), recent experimental work suggests auditory and visual notifications are fairly benign (e.g., Johannes, Dora et al, 2019; Johannes, Veling, et al, 2019). However, this may have been because the stimuli under investigation did not contain personally relevant information such as sender name, while experimental work suggests that more personally relevant stimuli more strongly interfere with attention (Wingenfeld et al, 2006).…”

Supplemental Material for The effect of mere presence of smartphone on cognitive functions: A four-level meta-analysis.

“…One potential source of smartphone-related cognitive interference, which has garnered some concerns from the general public and researchers, is simply the mere presence of smartphone that may attract the orientation of attention due to its growing saliency (Leynes et al, 2018;Mourra et al, 2020;Shelton et al, 2009;. Despite numerous experimental studies having been conducted to examine the cognitive effect of mere presence of smartphone, findings from the existing studies have been mixed with heterogeneity in experimental procedures, sample characteristics, and cognitive tasks (e.g., Aguila, 2019;Johannes et al, 2019;Stone, 2020;Tanil & Yong, 2020;Tarantino, 2019). Hence, the primary goal of this research was to conduct a systematic review and quantitative integration of the current findings on the effect of smartphone presence on cognitive outcomes, estimating an overall effect size of this relationship.…”

“…Smartphones had to be visually present in the smartphone presence condition. Upon further examination of the 786 potentially eligible records, 29 records (contributing 33 unique studies with 53 samples) met all inclusion criteria, 1 of which 19 were journal articles (Boila et al, 2020;Canale et al, 2019;Hartmann et al, 2020;Ito & Kawahara, 2017;Johannes et al, 2018Johannes et al, , 2019Kaminske et al, 2022;Koessmeier & Büttner, 2022;Linares & Sellier, 2021;Liu, Dempo, Kimura, et al, 2022;Liu, Dempo, & Shinohara, 2022;Nakagawa et al, 2022;Niu et al, 2022;Pellowe et al, 2015;Ruiz Pardo & Minda, 2022;Skowronek et al, 2023;Tanil & Yong, 2020;Thornton et al, 2014;, nine were unpublished theses or dissertations (Aguila, 2019;Bailey, 2018;Beijer, 2020;Bianchi Bosch, 2018;de Werd, 2020;Ruiz Pardo, 2022;Stahl, 2018;Stone, 2020;Tarantino, 2019), and one was a conference poster (Lyngs, 2017).…”

“…Although numerous recent studies have been conducted (e.g., Aguila, 2019;Johannes et al, 2019;Stone, 2020;Tanil & Yong, 2020;Tarantino, 2019), efforts to reconcile the equivocality have been hindered by heterogeneity in experimental procedures, sample characteristics, and cognitive tasks. For instance, there has been significant variability in the way studies have manipulated smartphone presence.…”

“…Further, in inducing smartphone absence, there have been discrepancies regarding whether smartphones were switched off completely (e.g., Thornton et al, 2014), left on airplane mode (e.g., Hartmann et al, 2020), left on silent mode with vibration enabled (e.g., Tanil & Yong, 2020), or left on silent mode without vibration (e.g., . In addition, some studies chose to introduce a cover story to reduce demand characteristics as a potential confound (e.g., Stahl, 2018;Thornton et al, 2014), while others did not (e.g., Canale et al, 2019;Johannes et al, 2019). This methodological variance in the manipulation of smartphone presence may affect the salience of smartphones as a momentary distractor of cognitive functions.…”