New research suggests that just receiving cellphone notifications can cause enough of a distraction to impair an individual's ability to focus on a given task.

Researchers at Florida State University found that a single notification -- whether it is a sound or a vibration - is comparable to the effects seen when people are actively using their phones to make calls or send test messages.

"Our results suggest that mobile phones can disrupt attention performance even if one does not interact with the device," researchers wrote, according to Mashable. "As mobile phones become integrated into more and more tasks, it may become increasingly difficult for people to set their phones aside and concentrate fully on the task at hand, whatever it may be."

For the study, researchers compared the performance of participants on an attention-demanding computer task, which was divided into two parts. In the first part, participants were asked simply to complete the task. During the second part, although they were not aware of it, participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups: call, text or no notification. Automated calls and texts were then sent to the personal phones of participants in the first two groups without their knowledge that the notifications were coming from the researchers.

Researchers found that those who received notifications made more mistakes on the computer task than those who didn't. In fact, the increase in the probability of making a mistake was more than three times greater for those who received notifications. Those who received phone call notifications fared worse on the task than those who received a text alert.

"The level of how much it affected the task at hand was really shocking," said Courtney Yehnert, a research coordinator who worked on the study.

It's well documented that using a mobile phone while performing another task is associated with poorer performance. According to the study, that is because people have limited capacity for attention that must be split between tasks. The current study underscores that simply being aware of a missed call or text can have the same effect.

"Although these notifications are generally short in duration, they can prompt task-irrelevant thoughts, or mind-wandering, which has been shown to damage task performance," the researchers wrote in the paper. "Cellular phone notifications alone significantly disrupt performance on an attention-demanding task, even when participants do not directly interact with a mobile device during the task."

The findings are detailed in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.