Triggering and Detecting Attentional Narrowing in Controlled Environments

Abstract

Attentional narrowing refers to a state in which operators, involuntarily and unconsciously, fail to process a subset of potentially critical information. Little is known about factors that trigger the phenomenon and how to detect and distinguish it from a related state, focused attention, where one deliberately concentrates on one source of information. The objectives of this study were to (1) evaluate the effectiveness of three factors - workload, a novel difficult problem and incentive - for inducing attentional narrowing, and (2) identify markers of attentional narrowing and focused attention. Performance, eye-tracking data and anxiety levels were recorded while participants timeshared numerous tasks. When confronted with a novel problem, participants’ visual attention narrowed towards the affected task, and performance dropped on several tasks when all three factors were present. The findings from this study highlight promising means of inducing narrowing and show that eye-tracking, together with performance data, enable real-time detection of attentional narrowing.