Sorry, what did you say? — Distraction Testing
Have you ever found yourself absent minded? Ever woken up too early in the morning and gone to fix yourself a cup of coffee during the hustle and bustle of the family rush, when finishing up you catch yourself putting the milk back in the cupboard and the sugar bowl into the fridge? Well that’s distractibility. A recent attention researcher and psychologist Nilli Lavie, from University College London has developed a new psychological test to measure this exact construct.
Lavie based his test of distractibility on his work regarding perceptual load theory. This theoretical basis increases the construct validity seeing as it is founded on an existing body of knowledge. His theory specifies that humans have a limited capacity of stimulus perception, which is called the “perceptual load” and thus we can successfully attend to the information below this threshold. However, once stimuli is so abundant it surpasses this maximum perception threshold our attention is reduced to task-relevant information. This is not too different than the experiences we face in day to day life, whether it be from driving our noisy children in the morning traffic to school, to attempting to read on a park bench with passersby, distractions are everywhere which increases the risks of error and accidents.
His new indicator scale of distractibility is a computerized test, which assesses a participants’ latency reaction time, when faced with the task of selecting which letter does not belong in a series, all the while distractor letters flash to detract focus. The speed at which participants respond by pressing the appropriate key on a keyboard is measuring their distractibility rating. The potential use of this psychological test is to be implemented in professional screening settings, where job candidates who are easily distracted can be filtered out. This is of particularly relevance to high-risk professions, where minor distractions can lead to grave and perhaps even fatal errors such as bus drivers or military officers etc.
This test can also be useful in office settings, where errors are not as costly, however Lavie’s test can be of utility seeing as hiring low- distractible employees ensures higher productivity and efficiency. Equally, this test has shown to correlate highly with the “Cognitive Failures Questionnaire” which serves to measure the same construct, however through means of a self-report survey, and thus this correlation increases its’ concurrent validity. Personally, I see greater benefits from using Lavie’s distractibility test rather than the “Cognitive Failures Questionnaire” to assess this construct, seeing as this questionnaire can be biased if raters respond dishonestly and in a more socially desirable manner. I cannot help but wonder what is the purpose of asking about distractibility, instead of measuring it directly like in Lavie’s test where subjective bias cannot play a role.
External validity is ensured in Lavie’s psychometric test seeing as it simulates real life distractions, being that we must maintain focus despite constant attentional intrusions. To be more specific, it targets distractors in their implicit sense, seeing as it is not a task of direct distraction similar to being on your phone texting, or multitasking, rather it deals with measuring attention at the level of cognitive perceptual load which more closely parallels the uncontrollable situational intrusions we experience everyday.
Hope you enjoyed, and weren’t too distracted while reading!
