Interrupted Minds

Riana Sarwal, Raghu Raja Mehra

Abstract: Adolescents now study in an environment that is designed, at the level of the operating system, to interrupt them. This study investigates how the volume and timing of smartphone notifications affect sustained attention and academic productivity among school students aged thirteen to eighteen. A mixed-methods design was used, combining a survey of 180 students with a seven-day notification and study log, a controlled experiment in which 60 participants completed a Sustained Attention to Response Task under three phone conditions, and a two-week intervention trial with 42 volunteers. Participants received a mean of 132 notifications per day, of which 29.5% arrived within the three-hour evening window they identified as their main study period. The median uninterrupted study segment lasted 6.4 minutes. In the experimental phase, commission errors on the sustained-attention task rose from 8.2 in the phone-absent condition to 17.4 with notifications enabled, and reaction-time variability rose correspondingly; the difference was statistically significant with a large effect size. Notification volume correlated negatively with an academic productivity index, and together with problematic-use scores explained 38% of its variance. A two-week batched-notification protocol reduced phone interactions during study by 56% and more than doubled the median uninterrupted segment. The findings indicate that the cost of a notification lies less in the seconds spent reading it than in the disproportionately long recovery that follows, and that this cost is highly tractable through simple structural changes to the notification environment.

Keywords: sustained attention; smartphone notifications; task switching; attention residue; adolescent cognition; academic productivity; digital self-regulation

How to Cite?: Riana Sarwal, Raghu Raja Mehra, "Interrupted Minds", Volume 15 Issue 8, August 2026, International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR), Pages: 2127-2133, https://www.ijsr.net/getabstract.php?paperid=SR26825123304, DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21275/SR26825123304

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