I’VE never thought of myself as particularly distractable, but today the evidence seems to suggest otherwise. While wondering how to start this article I have: 1) opened an email alert telling me I have spam; 2) stared at a colleague’s new haircut; and 3) watched a cloud shaped like a cow turn into a sad face, and wondered if it meant anything. Getting down to work is proving to be rather a struggle.
Wandering attention is an occupational hazard for the average office worker; research suggests that interruptions can take up to 2 hours out of the working day (New Scientist, 28 June 2006, p 46). Of the many things that disrupt our flow, visual distractions, like email notifications, flashing telephone message lights or people walking past the window, are among the most difficult to ignore. In the office these kinds of distractions are annoying, but for pilots, air traffic controllers and truck drivers – occupations where there are many visual distractions – they can be downright dangerous. A study of drivers by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration last year showed that .
Clearly some people are better at concentrating through these kinds of distractions than others, but until recently there was no easy way to quantify someone’s visual distractability, or to reliably compare different people, and so no way to tell whether someone would make an excellent air traffic controller, or would be better suited to another role. Thanks to a simple computer test devised by psychologist Nilli Lavie and her colleagues at University College London (UCL) that has all changed. Using their test it is, for the first time, possible to obtain an objective measure of an individual’s ability to concentrate in the face of a visual distraction. Surprisingly, it also suggests that the way to keep people’s minds on the job could be to make workstations more visually challenging, not simpler.
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If eye-catching distractions sometimes seem impossible to ignore, that’s probably because they are. Psychologist Jan Theeuwes at the Free University in Amsterdam tracked people’s eye movements during experiments in which they were asked to concentrate on one coloured shape while ignoring shapes of other colours. No matter how hard they tried, people couldn’t stop their eyes from wandering to the shape they were trying to ignore, Theeuwes found (). “It seems automatic,” he says. “The visual system takes over and selects things for us that we’re not even looking for.”
The distraction needn’t be right in front of you: it could be a lurid advertisement at the roadside or a fly hovering around you that grabs your attention. “You don’t have voluntary control – you can’t say ‘stop’ to a distracter,” Lavie says. “If you wish to ignore something, that doesn’t mean that you will succeed.”
Before Lavie’s test came along, most researchers investigating distractability used the cognitive failures questionnaire (CFQ), developed by University of Oxford psychologist Donald Broadbent in 1982. It asks people to describe how often they get distracted in particular situations, from failing to notice road signs to forgetting to lock their front door. In various studies since then, people with high scores on the questionnaire have been found to suffer fallout from their distractability, ranging from absent-minded injuries to forgetting to save computer files.
As a method of measuring distractability, however, the CFQ has some serious limitations: it relies on people self-reporting their absent-mindedness, which may be unreliable and, more importantly, it is unable to separate distractability from other factors like forgetfulness or poor organisational skills. It also gets us no closer to working out why some people are better at concentrating than others.
Lavie’s test gets round these problems. The test takes the form of a simple computer game in which volunteers are asked to concentrate on letters flashing up in a particular area on the screen, and to press one key if they see an N and another if they see an X (see Diagram). Outside this area, other letters pop up as distractions. It measures how much these distractions increase the time it takes to press the correct button and the number of mistakes people make. At the end of the test the program generates an “index of distractability”, which corresponds to a measure of a person’s powers of concentration.
Forced errors
I give it a go. It’s easy at first, but soon irrelevant letters start popping up in my peripheral vision, slowing me down and forcing me to make errors. In her experiments, Lavie found that while distractions slowed everybody’s reaction time, some people slowed by nearly twice as much as others (). Some people don’t even notice that they have made mistakes, and walk away from the test thinking they have performed well, Lavie says.
When the going gets tough, however, something surprising happens: the difference between the poor concentrators and good concentrators disappears. During more visually intensive tasks, when the area of screen to focus on is more cluttered with letters, most people are able to ignore the distractions.
This suggests there could be a way to trick the brain into paying attention by tapping into the way it focuses its attention. The fact is that even the most inattentive people aren’t total slaves to distraction. Being able to focus on the important aspects of the world around us is crucial to nearly everything we do, be it driving a car, watching television, or just walking down the street. Without some kind of underlying sorting mechanism, the world would be a surge of information with no way for us to prioritise the important stuff.
“There could be a way to trick the brain into paying attention”
Until recently, psychologists disagreed on how the brain deals with this problem. One camp reckoned that the act of concentration induces your brain to become blinkered to irrelevant distractions, so it won’t process them at all. Imagine concentrating on driving: you watch for road signs and hazards while tracking the bend of the road and the car in front. These researchers argued that while doing these tasks your brain is less likely to take note of a billboard at the roadside.
The other camp thought that the minute we open our eyes we perceive everything, and that the brain sorts through what’s important after this information has been collected. So back in the driving seat, your brain’s visual system would perceive the billboard but would prioritise the information about the upcoming bend in the road.
In 1997 Lavie did a series of experiments which, she says, showed that both camps were wrong. Concentrating in itself is not enough to screen out distractions. Moreover, there is an upper limit to what our eyes can perceive – it can’t take in everything at once.
In one of these experiments, she asked people to complete quick-fire word-based tasks on a computer screen while distracting them (). The person’s goal was either to decide whether words appearing on a computer screen were upper or lower case, or the trickier task of counting each word’s syllables. On the screen’s periphery, a simulation of a moving starfield gave the sensation of moving forward or backward through space – a distraction which Lavie asked people to ignore. Using functional MRI, she monitored activity in a part of the brain called V5, in the visual cortex, which becomes active when we experience such sensations of movement.
The results were surprising. During the simple word puzzles, V5 was active despite people consciously attempting to ignore the starfield. There goes one side of the attention debate: it would appear that you can’t always filter out distractions simply by concentrating. But that wasn’t the whole story. The brain imaging also showed that when the word task became harder – for instance, syllable-counting rather than identifying the letter’s case – the V5 region became less active. People had become more successful at ignoring the starfield.
So what was going on during the harder puzzle? We have a limited capacity for absorbing visual information, says Lavie. “We’re not machines. We can’t perceive everything.” So when a more visually intensive task – such as processing the starfield as well as the word – “loads” the brain’s attention, we become increasingly blind to distractions, and our performance on the task will improve: reaction times get faster, and error rates drop. That means that the harder you are forced to concentrate, the less likely you are to be distracted.
The part of the brain in charge of controlling whether we accept or ignore distractions is a region called the parietal cortex. It sits close to the visual cortex, which feeds it information from the eyes for distribution to other parts of the brain. Many studies have shown that the parietal cortex is crucial to concentration. For example, . “Some people equate it to a switchboard,” says Lavie. And according to her theory, even when the parietal cortex is healthy, if too many calls come in to it, the switchboard jams and can’t accept any new information, however distracting.
Loading the brain to render it blind to distractions is a strategy that has been repeated in various other experiments, and the concept has been widely accepted, says John Duncan, an attention researcher at the University of Cambridge. However, he points out that in the real world the act of focusing our attention is much more complex than demonstrated in Lavie’s experiments, which test only visual perception. For example, as you read this article, you might also be trying to screen out the sound of somebody talking nearby, or ignoring “internal” distractions such as stress or hunger, both of which involve different areas of the brain from those in play when we are distracted visually. “There isn’t a general ability to keep attention on track,” says Duncan.
Nonetheless, Lavie’s findings could have practical benefits for anyone who is… well, boring. For example, someone giving a presentation might be able to reduce the impact of distractions elsewhere in the room, not by making their slides clear and easy to read, but by perhaps adding a textured background or moving images.
Lavie and her UCL colleague Sophie Forster are also investigating whether schoolchildren’s books and educational materials could be designed to hold attention better. Her theory would suggest that feeding simple tasks to easily distracted kids is the worst thing you can do. “You should think about making educational materials more perceptually engaging. We’re trying different colours, patterns and backgrounds,” says Lavie. She admits that it’s a long shot, and other researchers agree. “Of course if it happened it would be a spectacular result, but I wouldn’t invest a large sum in betting on it working,” says Duncan.
Back in the lab at UCL, Lavie is scribbling the results of my distractability test on a piece of paper. My score was disappointingly average, but Lavie says it isn’t necessarily something I should worry about. Phew. For one minute there, I thought my ability as a writer might suf
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Ever decreasing span
Are TV and the internet shrinking our attention spans? Some researchers think that they might be. A study published in September this year found that children who watched more than 2 hours of television a day during early childhood were more likely to develop attention problems later in life. The link held even if children were weaned off television as they grew up – the damage was done early, and seemed to last.
Could the internet be having a similar effect? It is certainly set up to cater for short attention spans. Web designers work on the assumption that users will stay on a site for 10 seconds or less, and go to great lengths to make their pages eye-catching and easy to navigate.
Users no longer tolerate reams and reams of text, choosing instead to search for a word or phrase on page. So is all this spawning a generation of skim readers?
So far there are no clear answers. A few studies have made a link between internet addiction and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), although there is no clear cause-and-effect relationship between the two. Even the effects of “normal” internet use can’t be assessed, as the net hasn’t been around long enough to allow for long-term studies.
Erik Landhuis, a psychologist at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, says that if internet use has an impact on concentration, the mechanisms are unlikely to be the same as for TV. “Watching TV is a very passive activity,” he says. “Surfing the internet is interactive, and requires at least some level of concentration on the part of the viewer. It may be that internet use changes attention patterns, rather than making them ‘better’ or ‘worse’.”
A drain on the brain
Research has shown that it is easier to concentrate on a task if it is complicated enough to force your brain to concentrate. But be careful not to ask your brain to cope with too much at once, or to tax it in the wrong way. In experiments, psychologist Nilli Lavie at University College London asked people to complete word-based tasks while holding a sequence of numbers in their working memory. While they did so, she distracted them with images of famous faces. Functional MRI showed the area of the brain associated with face recognition lit up, indicating that the (Science, vol 291, p 1803). This suggests that anything that requires you to hold information in your working memory could make you more prone to distraction.
This means that talking on your cellphone while driving – even hands-free – will almost certainly make you much more prone to visual distractions and less likely to react to new information, such as a child running into the road. Also, if you are preoccupied with other stimuli or emotions, like stress, this will tax your working memory and increase your chance of being distracted, says Lavie. “If you have a tricky task, do it when you’re not so occupied,” she says.
A world of distraction
It’s physically impossible to stop your eyes following a stimulus that enters your visual field, which makes them particularly powerful distractors. But the working environment is packed full of other kinds of distractions, all competing for a slice of your attention.
Background noise such as the sound of other people typing and chatting is not too difficult to block out, but intermittent noises are another story. A study of office workers, conducted in 2004 by psychologist Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, found that noisy distractions coming from ringing telephones were responsible for 9 per cent of troublesome distractions, while people calling from another desk accounted for another 4 per cent. Once distracted it took people up to 25 minutes to get back to what they were working on.
A different study found that 1 in 3 workers in large open-plan offices say that draughts from air conditioning or leaky windows are the worst workplace distraction.
But compulsive email checkers beware: Mark’s study found that nearly half of all workplace interruptions are self-generated. For those, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
