Measuring Distraction in Simulated Public Environments

Overview

Participants must be 18 years of age or older, fluent in English, must not wear glasses (contacts are fine), and cannot have photosensitive epilepsy. The participant will enter a meeting area in the Haynes Engineering Building where they will first answer questions from a screener.  Once they are confirmed to be eligible, they will be given a randomized participant ID, informed of how the study will be conducted, and given the consent document to read through and sign as well as the demographics questionnaire.  In this demographics questionnaire, there will be an optional question to disclose any neurodivergence the participant may have that could affect their attention.  They will not be required to answer this question, and there will be a “choose not to disclose” box they can check.  This will take approximately 10-15 minutes.  From there the participant will be escorted through a door into the next room where the study will be held.

The participant will sit at the table facing the monitors and put on eye tracking glasses. Note, the Tobii Pro Glasses 3 will unobtrusively monitor what the user is looking at.  There is no visual recording of the user, the environment and where the user is looking at a given moment will be recorded.  From there they will interact with the laptop to watch a 15 minute clip from a video, where the speaker in the corner is blurred out, and gather information.  This laptop will also occasionally get pop up notifications in the corner of the screen.  With the information and notes they have, they will be asked to make a 1 to 2 slide presentation on the topic using Google Docs. This portion of the study will take approximately 30 minutes.  When that is completed, they will be asked to take off the eye tracking glasses and return to the previous room to complete a questionnaire regarding what they found most distracting and why to gather a subjective understanding of distraction to compare with the objective observations gathered by the eye tracking glasses.  This questionnaire should only take 5-10 minutes.