What’s more distracting: something overt or something subtle? Experiments show that although obvious distractions dominate perception, less noticeable ones can have a greater effect on action.
What should have been a straightforward psychology experiment at Brown University instead threw researchers a curve: When subjects performed the simple action of reaching toward a target on a computer screen, the trajectory of their hands would bend significantly more toward a visual object that was expected to be a minor distraction on the screen than toward a more significant visual distraction.
These path-bending results are a bit mind-bending. Intuition suggests that more blatant distractions should divert people more, and in many experiments, including ones in the new study published in Current Biology, they do divert people more as they attempt tasks of perception. These kinds of tasks are, for example, akin to finding a friendly face in a crowd.
