Perceptual load as an aid to attention in education

本次奖学金旨在进一步传播和扩展我的博士研究，将有影响力的注意力负荷理论应用于对日常生活分心的进一步理解。特别是，我的研究表明，报告日常生活高度分心的个体，只有当这些任务具有低水平的感知需求时，才会在实验室任务中表现出更多的干扰物：当需求增加时，所有参与者都表现出干扰物干扰的大幅减少，以至于分散注意力水平的个体差异被消除了。随后，我证明了知觉负荷对患有注意缺陷多动障碍的成年人也有类似的有益影响。我之前的研究也建立了一种新的干扰干扰的实验室测量方法，旨在与日常生活中的干扰平行，并澄清了增加正在执行的任务的感知需求可以减少日常生活中常见类型的干扰（例如，来自明显但完全无关的外部干扰或来自与任务无关的走神）的程度。拟议的资助将使我有机会进一步传播我的博士研究，发表和展示我所有剩余的未发表的数据。此外，我建议进一步探讨我的发现对教育领域的一个有希望的实际意义。我计划使用我将在奖学金期间获得的多层次建模技术，全面分析我在博士期间收集的大型数据集，该数据集描述了注意力分散易感性与学习成绩之间的关系。我还建议用两项研究来扩展我的博士研究，直接研究增加真正的教育任务（如阅读理解和数学练习）的感知需求，是否可以通过减少易受干扰的程度来提高任务表现。这一发现有可能为教育干预提供信息，以减少课堂和作业中的分心，使教育工作者和学生都受益，并且可能会超出我目前的认知心理学领域，进入教育领域。研究结果将通过进一步的出版物和在国家和国际会议上的发言以及在教育心理学家和教师会议上的发言来传播。

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would allow me an opportunity to further disseminate my PhD research, publishing and presenting all of my remaining unpublished data .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.