Afgeleid door je Scherm: Het Effect van Interrupties door Sociale Media Notificaties op Coherence Monitoring

In a world full of social media distractions, it is important to understand how interruptions affect reading comprehension, especially coherence monitoring, the process of detecting inconsistencies in a text. This study tested the effect of social media-like interruptions on coherence monitoring. Eighty university students read short stories, some with inconsistencies, and received email notifications during half of them. The timing of the interruptions was varied to examine its influence. Results showed that participants took longer to read inconsistent sentences, suggesting they noticed the inconsistencies. However, the presence or timing of interruptions had no significant effect on this process. This suggests that coherence monitoring may be a relatively automatic and robust process, even in the face of distractions. Participants also answered questions about how distracted they felt during the task and while studying in general. Those who felt distracted during the experiment...Show moreIn a world full of social media distractions, it is important to understand how interruptions affect reading comprehension, especially coherence monitoring, the process of detecting inconsistencies in a text. This study tested the effect of social media-like interruptions on coherence monitoring. Eighty university students read short stories, some with inconsistencies, and received email notifications during half of them. The timing of the interruptions was varied to examine its influence. Results showed that participants took longer to read inconsistent sentences, suggesting they noticed the inconsistencies. However, the presence or timing of interruptions had no significant effect on this process. This suggests that coherence monitoring may be a relatively automatic and robust process, even in the face of distractions. Participants also answered questions about how distracted they felt during the task and while studying in general. Those who felt distracted during the experiment showed a negative effect of interruptions on reading. This suggests that people are somewhat accurate in judging their own distraction after the fact. However, general self-perception of distractibility during studying did not align with task performance for all: participants who considered themselves easily distracted while studying did not actually show negative effects of interruptions. This indicates that beliefs about one’s general distractibility may not always reflect actual behavior in specific situations. Finally, participants who reported that they usually do not immediately respond to notifications while studying showed a stronger response to inconsistencies, which might indicate deeper processing of the text. These findings suggest that short interruptions may not strongly disrupt coherence monitoring, but future research is needed to test this in more natural reading environments and with more vulnerable groups, such as younger or less experienced readers. This is especially relevant in a time when the ability to detect misinformation and inconsistencies in texts is becoming increasingly important.Show less

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Afgeleid door je Scherm: Het Effect van Interrupties door Sociale Media Notificaties op Coherence Monitoring