Fractionating Distraction: How Past- and Future-Relevant Distractors Influence Integrated Decisions

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance 2023-05, Vol.49 (5), p.737-752
• Main Authors: Barnes, Lydia, Rangelov, Dragan, Mattingley, Jason B., Woolgar, Alexandra
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Attention; Behavioral responses; Cognition; Color; Complex tasks; Cues; Decision Making; Distraction; Female; Human; Humans; Information processing; Male; Planned Behavior; Reaction Time - physiology; Responses; Sensitivity analysis; Task Complexity
• ISSN: 0096-1523; 1939-1277; 1939-1277
• DOI: 10.1037/xhp0001081

Many everyday tasks require us to integrate information from multiple steps to make a decision. Dominant accounts of flexible cognition suggest that we are able to navigate such complex tasks by attending to each step in turn, yet few studies measure how we direct our attention to immediate and future task steps. Here, we used a two-step task to test whether participants are sensitive to information that is currently irrelevant but will be relevant in a future task step. Participants viewed two displays in sequence, each containing two superimposed moving dot clouds of different colors. Participants attended to one cued target color in each display and reported the average direction of the two target dot clouds. In a subset of trials, we presented a "decoy" distractor: the second target color appeared as the distractor in the first display. We regressed behavioral responses on the dot clouds' motion directions to track how this future-relevant "decoy" distractor influenced participants' reporting of the average target direction. We compared the influence of decoy distractors to never-relevant, recently relevant, and globally relevant distractor baselines. Across four experiments, we found that responses reflected what was immediately relevant, as well as the broader historical relevance of the distractors. However, relevance for a future task step did not reliably influence attention. We propose that attention in multistep tasks is shaped by what has been relevant in the current setting, and by the immediate demands of each task step. Public Significance StatementOur everyday functioning depends on our ability to piece together information to make coherent decisions. Understanding how we efficiently select and integrate goal-relevant information is critical if we wish to anticipate how decision-making can go wrong, whether because of fatigue, mental load, or illness. This study shows that decisions in multistep tasks reflect two distinct processes: narrow focus on what is relevant in each step, alongside broader awareness of what has been relevant in this setting.