Personalized smartphone notifications bias auditory salience across processing stages

Abstract

Modern digital environments expose the brain to a dense stream of personally meaningful cues that differ markedly from the conditions under which sensory systems evolved. Understanding how the brain responds and adapts to such environments is increasingly relevant for cognitive and mental well-being. In this study, we used auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded during a task-irrelevant auditory oddball paradigm to obtain a time-resolved account of neural responses to smartphone notifications. We dissociated the effects of generic notification sounds from the learning-related effects of personalized notification sounds, and examined how these responses varied across levels of smartphone use. Among early stages of processing, generic tones exhibited experience-dependent strengthening of auditory representations, whereas personalized tones engaged stable, pre-learned representations, as reflected in P2 dynamics. The strongest stimulus-dependent modulation was observed in pre-attentive salience detection, reflected in the mismatch negativity (MMN), which was earlier and larger for personalized tones compared to generic ones. At later stages, attentional orienting and extended evaluative processing showed distinct patterns that were differentially sensitive to stimulus identity and smartphone use. Notably, smartphone usage levels modulated later attentional and evaluative stages (P3a and LPP) without altering early pre-attentive prediction-error signaling. Overall, our findings demonstrate that personalized smartphone notifications do not uniformly increase neural distraction. Instead, they engage robust and rapid pre-attentive prediction-error signaling that is largely independent of usage, while habitual smartphone use selectively shapes later attentional orienting and evaluative dynamics. Significance statementModern digital environments are saturated with personalized cues, such as smartphone notifications, that are known to disrupt ongoing behavior. A common assumption in discussions of digital distraction is that repeated exposure to such cues progressively amplifies their sensory salience, rendering habitual users increasingly reactive. Here, we challenge this assumption using an ecologically grounded neural paradigm with personalized notification sounds. We show that personalized notifications engage robust early salience detection that is shared across users, while habitual smartphone use selectively modulates later attentional and evaluative processing. These findings place important constraints on how repeated exposure to personalized digital cues shapes neural processing, indicating that usage-related effects emerge downstream rather than at early sensory stages.