Distractibility is a function of engagement, not task difficulty: Evidence from a new oculomotor capture paradigm.

Abstract

It has been shown that when humans require a brief moment of concentration or mental effort, they tend to avert their gaze away from the attended location (or even blink). Similarly, participants tend to miss unexpected events when they are highly focused on a task. We present an engagement theory of distractibility that is meant to capture the relationship between participants' engagement in a task and reduction in sensitivity to new sensory events in a broad range of situations. In a series of experiments, we asked participants to perform different cognitive tasks of varying degrees of difficulty while we measured spontaneous oculomotor capture by new images that were completely unrelated to the participants' task. The images appeared while participants were cognitively engaged in the task. Our results showed that increased cognitive engagement produced decreased sensitivity to visual events. We propose that individual differences in intrinsic motivation play a large role in determining sensitivity to task unrelated events. In addition, our results also indicate that changes in task difficulty on a trial-to-trial basis do not generate trial-by-trial differences in oculomotor capture. Importantly, we believe our framework provides us with a promising way of extending laboratory findings to many real world situations. (PsycINFO Database Record

Why are background telephone conversations distracting?

“…For example, reducing the perceptual discriminability of to-be-remembered material eliminates the disruption that an unexpected deviant sound confers on the ordered recall of sequences of visually-presented items (Hughes et al, 2013). It was argued in Hughes et al (2013) that perceptual difficulty increased task-encoding load and eliminated the disruptive effect of the unexpected deviant sound by supporting an upward shift in focal task-engagement through a top-down mechanism (for a similar notion, see Buetti &Lleras, 2016, andFaber et al, 2017).…”

Visual working memory supports perceptual stability across saccadic eye movements.

“…Another possibility is that by engaging participants in an auditory task and incentivizing performance on that task by requesting the AWM response first, participants may have disengaged from the saccade task. For example, Buetti and Lleras (2016) showed that engagement in an auditory task leads to less distraction by visual events. Finally, it is also possible participants translated their response to the saccade task into a verbal code (e.g., "forwards"), which was then disrupted by the letter memory task.…”

Eye behavior predicts susceptibility to visual distraction during internally directed cognition

“…Via written instruction, we informed participants that the pictures were irrelevant and that they should maintain gaze on the screen throughout the experiment because eyes were only tracked within the area of the screen. This approach to use attentional capture by distractor images during IDC as index of attentional focus was previously employed by Buetti and Lleras (2016). At the end of each trial, participants were prompted to type in their best and second-best idea.…”