Supervisors: Mirja Hubert & Alice Grønhøj
Discussants: Sonja Perkovic & Pol Chrysocho

Abstract
In today’s attention economy, digital platforms continually compete for users’ limited attentional resources, reshaping how people allocate their attention in everyday life. Constant connectivity, frequent smartphone notifications, and the ease of accessing social media create persistent competition for our attention and may hinder our ability to stay focused on meaningful goals. This PhD project examines how individuals navigate and respond to the attentional demands of digital life across three papers.

The first paper explores everyday decisions to check social media and shows that these choices are strongly shaped by situational context. Low-engagement moments encourage checking, whereas socially meaningful situations discourage it, and people experience decision conflict when their actions do not align with the social norms or expectations of the situation. The second paper investigates how social media notification sounds influence cognitive performance by examining their impact on perceived task difficulty and cognitive effort across laboratory, online, and fMRI studies. The findings show that when social media distractions are introduced to a task, perceived task difficulty increases, and maintaining performance requires greater mental effort compared to non-digital or no-distraction conditions. The third paper focuses on individual differences and demonstrates that lower self-control over social media use predicts poorer working-memory performance when exposed to social media notification cues, while incremental attentional beliefs mitigate this effect.

Taken together, these papers shed light on how digital distractions capture our attention, how they strain cognitive resources, and how certain beliefs help individuals maintain focus amid constant competition for our attention.

Everyone is welcome!