You know that moment when you’re trying to read something on your phone, and a notification pops up, completely stealing your focus? That’s your attention being grabbed by what we call a “distractor”. This whole process is known as “involuntary attentional capture,” and it’s something researchers have been digging into for decades.
What’s the Big Question?
When we get distracted, what’s really going on in our brain? For a while, the main debate was whether our attention is automatically snagged by things like sudden flashes or movements (that’s called the “bottom-up” idea, because it comes from the very simple bottom of our cognitive hierarchy). Or, is it more about what we’re trying to focus on at that moment (the “top-down” idea, because it comes from us setting our goals on a very high level), meaning only things that are somehow relevant to our current goals actually distract us?
How Has Our Understanding Changed?
It turns out, it’s not just a simple either/or. Researchers realized that our past experiences—what we call “selection history”—also play a crucial role in what grabs our attention. We’re not just passive receivers of information; our brains can learn to actively suppress or ignore distractions, especially if they’re predictable. For instance, if a distractor often appears in the same place, we get better at tuning it out, thanks to our brain picking up on these statistical regularities.
Why Does This All Matter?
Understanding these details of how attention is captured and how we learn to control it isn’t just academic. It has real-world implications. By figuring out the connection between automatic and controlled attention, we can get evidence-based ideas for designing things better: maybe leading to fewer distracting heads-up displays in cars or helping people improve their focus while studying. The research is still ongoing as we try to understand how we manage attention in our complex, everyday lives.
Sauter, M. (2025). Seeing Past Distractions in Visual Search. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 51, 693-695. https://doi.org/10.1037/xhp0001284