We recently published a study on what happens when we get distracted during a visual search. Imagine you’re looking for your keys on a cluttered table. Sometimes, your eyes land on something shiny, like a coin, and you end up staring at it for a second before realizing it’s not what you’re looking for. That brief pause is what we call dwell time, and we wanted to find out why it happens.
What’s the Issue?
When we get distracted, two things might be happening: either our eyes are automatically pulled toward the shiny object (oculomotor capture), or we get stuck because it takes a moment to consciously shift our gaze away (disengagement). Most previous research doesn’t separate these two processes—they get lumped together as one. So, we designed an experiment to tease them apart.
How We Did It
We used eye-tracking to measure where people were looking during a visual search task. We had four different trial types: sometimes there was no distraction, sometimes a distracting object appeared in the middle, and sometimes it popped up on the side. This setup allowed us to measure both the automatic capture of attention and the conscious effort needed to disengage.
What Did We Find?
Our results showed that only about two-thirds of the time spent on distractions was due to automatic capture. The remaining one-third was because of the effort required to consciously pull attention away. This is a bigger role for disengagement than we expected, suggesting that we have more control over our attention than previously thought.
Why Does It Matter?
Understanding why we get stuck on distractions can help us design better tools and interfaces, like smartphones or car dashboards. If we know that part of the problem is how hard it is to shift our gaze away, we can start finding ways to make it easier to stay focused. Plus, it’s good news for anyone who feels like they get distracted too easily—it turns out it’s not entirely automatic; it’s something we can actually learn to control.
Stefani, M., Sauter, M. Relative contributions of oculomotor capture and disengagement to distractor-related dwell times in visual search. Sci Rep 13, 16676 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-43604-x