Probing attentional allocation with a novel forced-response method

Life is full of distractions. There are car noises from outside, pop-ups on our computers, text messages that chime their appearance, and visual distractions while we are trying to concentrate on a task at hand. Yet humans are remarkably able to filter out distractions in the face of some goal that they are trying to reach. How is this accomplished? The present research program is aimed at studying how salient distractions in the visual world hurt ongoing performance and how humans manage to mitigate these distractions in order to be productive. Toward this end, the investigators have created a novel way of studying distraction. Participants search for a particular item among other distracting items while the moment-by-moment movement of their eyes is recorded. The task forces them to respond at varying times after the presentation of each visual array. The investigators can track where participants are looking and how distractions affect them at different times into the processing of each display. Data will also be analyzed using a computational model that helps uncover how distractions impair performance. This research creates a model situation for the study of distraction in the visual world. Participants see a series of geometric objects; their task is to move their eyes to the oddly shaped object in the display. To distract them, an oddly colored object that is irrelevant to the task is sometimes presented. A critical feature of the task is that it changes the time available to the participants to move their eyes with each display so that sometimes a response is required very quickly after a display is presented and sometimes participants have longer to process the visual information. Performance is modeled theoretically as consisting of two mental processes: 1) a reflexive response to the distractor that has to be avoided and 2) a goal-oriented response to the oddly shaped object. Finally, the investigators will study distraction in natural visual scenes. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.