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We would like to thank Blake Cowing and Diana Hanf for their assistance in reviewing the literature and providing useful comments.
It is well documented that interacting with a mobile phone is associated with poorer performance on concurrently performed tasks because limited attentional resources must be shared between tasks. However, mobile phones generate auditory or tactile notifications to alert users of incoming calls and messages. 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. We found that cellular phone notifications alone significantly disrupted performance on an attention-demanding task, even when participants did not directly interact with a mobile device during the task. The magnitude of observed distraction effects was comparable in magnitude to those seen when users actively used a mobile phone, either for voice calls or text messaging.
Mobile phones have become ubiquitous in modern culture; an estimated 91% of American adults report owning a mobile phone, and an increasing proportion of these are “smartphones,” which can also be used to access e-mail and social media, download music, and watch videos (Duggan, 2013). A common concern is that these multiuse electronic devices are a significant distractor and that many users, particularly adolescents and young adults, do not make judicious decisions about when it is safe and appropriate to use a mobile device (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2012, 2013). In addition to the well-known effects of cellular phone−related distraction on driving performance, which are found whether or not drivers use a hands-free device (Caird, Johnston, Willness,...