Seeing notifications from social media apps seems to throw us off course for several seconds – even if we don’t open them.

Hippolyte Fournier at Lumière University Lyon 2 in France has long been interested in understanding attention and how social media affects it. “I feel impacted when I receive a notification from a social media app while I’m working,” he says.

To learn more, Fournier and his colleagues asked 180 university students to complete a psychology test known as a Stroop task on a smartphone-sized screen. This measures how quickly someone can name the colour of a series of printed words that spell different colours, such as the word “purple” written in green.

While the students carried out the task, social media notifications popped up, which they couldn’t open. Some were led to believe the alerts were their own, synced from their smartphones, while others weren’t. A third group saw blurred alerts that couldn’t be read.

The researchers found that the participants who believed the notifications were real were the most distracted of the three groups, “which makes sense, as they’re the ones with the most cognitive investment in what’s going on via their phone”, says neuroscientist Dean Burnett, who wasn’t involved in the study.

This group’s responses on the Stroop task were slowed about 7 seconds, on average, compared with when they did the task without a notification appearing. This was particularly the case among the participants who frequently checked their phones, based on screen time data gathered over the three weeks before the study.

Burnett says the study demonstrates that receiving a lot of notifications “compromises your ability to think”.

“We have top-down attention, which is consciously controlled, and bottom-up attention, which is instinctively controlled,” he says. “Usually they balance out, but if something occurs that our senses deem significant, the bottom-up system immediately diverts resources, leaving less, if any, cognitive room for the thing we actually want to focus on, which means we get distracted.”

The scientists plan to do more research to better understand why notifications are so distracting and if this varies depending on the type of alert. For now, Fournier recommends people manage their notifications by turning them off and then only checking social media at set times of the day. “Several studies have shown that turning off notifications was associated with a feeling of having more control over one’s attention in everyday life,” he says.

The study has been published on PsyArXiv, no DOI is available