An Investigation into the Self-deployment of Attentional Reminders

Abstract

In a series of studies, we sought to determine whether 1) people will self-deploy attentional reminders when asked to complete an attentionally demanding task (Experiment 1 & 2), 2) people modulate the number of attentional reminders they selected depending on the presence or absence of a continuous distraction (Experiment 1 & 2) and 3) if so, do reminders improve performance on the attentionally demanding task (Experiment 1, 2 & 3). In Experiments 1 and 2 participants were asked to complete an attentionally demanding task (2-back; primary task) and completed the 2-back task on its own (no distraction condition) or while a distracting video was played on the computer screen above the 2-back task stimuli (distraction condition). Critically, participants were given a preview of the 2-back task and the video (if present). After being given a preview of the task, they were asked to set how many (if any) reminders they wanted to receive during the task. We followed this up in Experiment 3, where we removed the choice component. Specifically, in this study, half of the participants received experimenter-set attentional reminders (every 2 minutes) while the other half did not receive any reminders. Findings from Experiments 1 and 2 indicated that people will opt to select attentional reminders when asked to complete an attentionally demanding task, however, their modulation of the reminders was irrespective of the presence or absence of a distracting video. In addition, the attentional reminders people set did not influence performance on the 2-back task. Experiment 3 demonstrated that people who received experimenter-set attentional reminders did not significantly perform better on the 2-back task in the presence of a distracting video. These results suggest that the attentional reminders may influence performance, however, their influence might be dependent on the contingent timing of the deployment of the attentional reminders.