Trade-off between dependence on WM and gathering information from the external world. a Our implicit measure of working memory (WM) use: Copying each object requires its identity and location information (attribute) to be held in memory. Counting successful pick-ups (i.e., identity feature used) and placements (i.e., location feature used) between model fixations provided a measure of the number of attributes used in WM. b Average number of attributes used in WM in both movement effort conditions as a function of distraction, c distribution of attributes used in WM (%). Error bars represent the standard error of the mean (N = 30). Lines show individual participant data. N shows the number of total sequences included in the analysis. The symbols *, ** and *** in the figure indicate statistical significance with p-values less than 0.05, 0.01 and 0.001, respectively. Credit: Kumle et al. (Communication Psychology, 2024, Springer’s Nature).
Humans are naturally well-equipped to perform procedural tasks such as following a recipe and assembling furniture. However, while performing these tasks, people can sometimes encounter visual distractors, such as irrelevant ingredients in the same cupboard as those listed in a recipe.
Ignoring these distractors, focusing on relevant objects, and successfully completing a task is usually easy for people, but their presence can nonetheless affect the way tasks are completed. Investigating the potential effects of visual distractors during long-term tasks in experimental settings has thus far proven challenging.
Researchers from the University of Oxford and Goethe University of Frankfurt have recently started investigating these effects using virtual reality (VR) technology. Their findings, published in Communication psychologysuggest that visual distraction has some consequences, most notably slowing people’s movements as they complete tasks and forcing them to perform more actions.
“Visual distraction is a ubiquitous aspect of everyday life,” Levi Kumle, Melissa LH Võ and their colleagues wrote in their paper. “However, studying the consequences of distraction during temporally extended tasks is not feasible with traditional methods. We developed a virtual reality approach that segments complex behavior into cognitive subcomponents, including encoding, visual search, working memory use, and decision-making.”
Kumle, Võ and their colleagues recruited 30 participants and asked them to take part in two experimental studies, about a week apart. During these tests, participants were asked to perform a task in VR, wearing an HTC Vive Tobii Pro VR headset and an HTC Vive controller.
The participants navigated through two different virtual environments, called the instruction room and the experimental room. After confirming that they could effectively use the VR equipment in the instruction room, they moved on to the testing room, where they performed a simple task.
This task involved selecting 8 target objects from a source pool of 24 objects, some of which were irrelevant to the task and thus were visual distractors. A model display showed participants which target objects to select and how to arrange them within a workspace.
Their job was to reproduce the configuration of objects on the screen by retrieving objects from the resource pool and placing them on the workstation, all within a limited time. The researchers changed the location of the model display and the opacity of objects in the resource pool (that is, making them harder or easier to identify) to determine whether this affected participants’ performance on the task.
“Participants copied a model view by selecting objects from a resource pool and placing them in a workspace,” the researchers explained. “By manipulating the distractibility of objects in the resource pool, we discovered interfering effects of distraction across the different cognitive subcomponents.”
Interestingly, the researchers found that visual distraction influenced the study participants’ sensory-mnemonic decisions. This affected their ability to coordinate their working memory and encode information while trying to complete the task, manifesting in a slowing of their actions and performing more expensive body movements.
“We successfully traced the consequences of distraction, from overall task performance to the decision-making processes that determine memory use,” the team said. “Distraction slowed behavior and increased costly body movements. Crucially, distraction increased encoding demands, slowed visual search, and reduced reliance on working memory.”
Overall, the findings suggest that while people engage in natural goal-directed behavior, visual distractions do not necessarily prevent them from achieving a goal, but they still have cascading consequences, slowing their movements and reducing the effort required to achieve a goal. task completion increases. In addition to shedding new light on the effects of visual distraction, their research highlights the potential of using VR paradigms to conduct psychological and behavioral experiments.
More information:
Levi Kumle et al., Multifaceted consequences of visual distraction during natural behavior, Communication psychology (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s44271-024-00099-0
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