Divided attention experiments

Understanding attentional control

Our ability to carry out many complex tasks in a complex real-world noisy and crowded environment places very high demands on our brain's attentional capacities. We have to divide our attention between tasks, be selective for tasks of importance or interest while ignoring other inputs, apply attentional control to focus on those tasks and sustain attention to them as long as needed or desired.

In this simulation, we won't go into the theory underlying these processes - they are complex. Instead, we have created an experiment that allows you to quantify your attentional skills, as described above, to carry out two complex tasks - one visual and one auditory.

In essence in this experiment, you will time how long it takes for you to trace your way (using your computer mouse) through mazes while listening to speech through your headphones or speakers. You can vary the complexity of the mazes across three levels of Small, Medium or Large (as explained in the Instructions tab) while trying to understand speech (with the complexity of that interfering speech varied, as explained in the Instructions tab).

Instructions

As noted in the Background tab in this experiment, you will time how long it takes for you to trace your way (using your computer mouse) through mazes while listening to speech through your headphones or speakers. Looking at the maze below, you an see two exit/entry ports. It doesn't matter which one you start at - the objective is to go from one of those entry ports through the maze, and out at the other port.

You can vary the complexity of the maze as small (low-complexity) through to large (high-complexity).

At the same time, you can have the speech playing through headphones at one of four levels;

• No speech
• Level 1 = A single speaker
• Level 2 = A single clear speaker in a noisy room
• Level 3 = Three speakers, and your task is to repeat the sentence said in the male voice

In the case when there is speech (Auditory distraction level 1, 2 or 3), you are required to say aloud the sentence as you hear it, at the same time as you work through the maze.

You need to select one combination of the Visual (Maze size) and Auditory (Auditory distraction level) tasks. Once you do so, you can hit "Start" to start the experiment. For each Auditory-Visual combination, there are 3 mazes to complete, i.e., 3 Trials. The data for each Trial (one of the 3 mazes in that Auditory-Visual combination) will be displayed in the table and you can download them as a ".csv" file.

Solving mazes while distracted