A study participant uses the computer set up in the lab where researchers explore how distractions can change what people perceive. Credit: Courtesy of Jiageng Chen

Don’t look now, but university researchers are studying the implications of distractions. 

Ohio State Vision and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab researchers collaborated with the cognitive control lab to find that when distractions are present, they pull people’s attention away from what they were supposed to be focused on, all the while convincing participants they weren’t distracted at all, Julie Golomb, senior author and associate professor of psychology and director of the neuroscience lab, said.

“We live in this world that’s full of distractions, and we have so much information to process at times,” Jiageng Chen, lead author and graduate student researcher at the neuroscience lab, said.

Twenty-six participants came to the lab and took a computerized test, where they were given four different colored squares, Golomb said. The target color had a white thick outline and the distraction color had dots around it. 

The participants were asked to select the target color seconds after seeing the options, Golomb said. 

Golomb said they did hundreds of trials and found that participants erred by picking the distraction color about 20 to 30 percent of the time. When there was no distractor, there were very few errors. 

Chen said the errors found were interesting because the participants were unaware when they were picking the wrong color.

“We noticed the participants would pick the exact distractor color, or in some cases, we noticed they shifted a little away from the target color, which could mean they were trying to avoid being sidetracked,” Chen said.

Chen said participants rated how confident they felt in picking the distraction color, with most selecting “highly confident.” 

Golomb said there wasn’t always a distractor present, but when there was, people’s attention was drawn almost immediately to it. 

“This wasn’t really testing memory,” Golomb said. “We think these were more perceptual errors when looking at these target and distractor colors.” 

Both labs were awarded a National Science Foundation grant to conduct more research on how distractions affect people in real-world scenarios, and Golomb said this is just the beginning.