Perceptual load as an aid to attention in education

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The proposed fellowship aims to further disseminate and extend my PhD research, which has applied the influential Load Theory of attention to further understanding of daily life distraction. In particular, my research has demonstrated that individuals reporting high levels of daily life distraction exhibit increased distractor interference on laboratory tasks only when these tasks have a low level of perceptual demands: When the demands were increased, all participants showed a substantial decrease in distractor interference to the extent that individual variation in levels of distraction was eliminated. I have subsequently demonstrated similarly beneficial effects of perceptual load for adults with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. My previous research has also established a new laboratory measure of distractor interference designed to parallel daily life distraction, and clarified that increasing the perceptual demands of a task being performed can reduce the extent to which common types of daily life distraction (e.g., from salient but entirely irrelevant external distracters or from task-unrelated mind-wandering) are experienced. The proposed funding would allow me an opportunity to further disseminate my PhD research, publishing and presenting all of my remaining unpublished data . In addition, I propose to further explore a promising practical implication of my findings for the field of Education. I plan to use multilevel modeling techniques, which I will acquire during the fellowship, to fully analyse a large dataset collected during my PhD characterizing the relationship between susceptibility to distraction and academic performance. I also propose to extend my PhD research with two studies directly examining whether increasing the perceptual demands of real educational tasks, such as reading comprehension and mathematical exercises, can benefit task performance by decreasing vulnerability to distraction. This finding has the potential to inform educational interventions to reduce distraction in the classroom and during homework, benefiting educators and students alike, and is likely to be of interest beyond my current field of Cognitive Psychology, to the field of Education. The findings would be disseminated both through further publications and through presentations at national and international conferences, and to meetings of Educational Psychologists and teachers.