There is a particular kind of automatic reaction that many people recognize only after it happens. You are sitting in a meeting, having coffee with a friend or watching television when a phone somewhere nearby makes a familiar notification sound. Before you consciously identify where the sound came from, you glance toward your own phone. Sometimes you even pick it up, unlock the screen and then realize that nothing happened. The notification belonged to someone else. Psychology offers several explanations for this surprisingly common behavior, including attentional capture, associative learning and habit automaticity. The important point is that the reaction does not necessarily mean someone is unusually distracted or addicted to their phone. Instead, repeated experiences can teach the brain that certain sounds are worth investigating.
Over time, a notification can become more than a sound. It can become a learned attention cue that signals the possibility of information, communication or something requiring a response.
