Abstract
Individuals reporting high levels of distractibility in everyday life show impaired performance in standard laboratory tasks measuring selective attention and inhibitory processes. Similarly, increasing cognitive load leads to more errors/distraction in a variety of cognitive tasks. How these two factors interact is currently unclear; highly distractible individuals may be affected more when their cognitive resources are taxed, or load may linearly affect performance for all individuals. We investigated the relationship between self-reported levels of cognitive failures (CF) in daily life and performance in the antisaccade task, a widely used tool examining attentional control. Levels of concurrent cognitive demand were manipulated using a secondary auditory discrimination task. We found that both levels of self-reported CF and task load increased antisaccade latencies while having no effect on prosaccade eye-movements. However individuals rating themselves as suffering few daily life distractions showed a comparable load cost to those who experience many. These findings suggest that the likelihood of distraction is governed by the addition of both internal susceptibility and the external current load placed on working memory.
Highlights
Cognitive slips and errors are common in daily life, with most people at one time or another forgetting where they left their car keys or if they left a light switched on at home
The present study establishes that both one’s dispositional susceptibility to cognitive failures (CF) and the situational cognitive load imposed on task goals can additively increase the likelihood of distraction as assessed by the antisaccade task
Differences in overt attention might account for increased distractor processing in high cognitive failures questionnaire (CFQ) scorers
Summary
Cognitive slips and errors are common in daily life, with most people at one time or another forgetting where they left their car keys or if they left a light switched on at home. The cognitive failures questionnaire (CFQ; Broadbent et al, 1982) is an established measure of individual differences in daily cognitive slips, with a number of questions relating to everyday errors such as the likelihood of dropping objects or failing to keep a task goal in mind While these kinds of questions might be seen to reflect lapses in memory, scores on this questionnaire are positively correlated with increased distraction of attention in a number of daily life situations: from absentmindedness while shopping (Reason and Lucas, 1984), to an increased number of car accidents (Larson and Merritt, 1991) and other mishaps or injuries at work (Wallace and Vodanovich, 2003). CFQ scores do not appear to predict performance in memory tasks (Wilkins and Baddeley, 1978), though they have been noted to affect memory in tasks requiring the inhibition of unwanted memories (Groome and Grant, 2005)
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