Neurodesign: MyChart

Research Summary 

            The research into attention and distraction got its start with advertising in the 20th century and continues to be the primary funder of attention research in the 21st century. Looking at the past three years of research we see a lot of focus on social media and ways to keep users focused amid an increasingly distracting world. I begin this summary with research examples from the annotated bibliography, the first article being Attention Affordances: Applying Attention Theory to the Design of Complex Visual Interfaces. This text discusses the importance of creating products that reduce the cognitive load and provide accessible affordances. An encouraging takeaway is that it shows that neuro-design knowledge can impact a product even late in the design process (Andersen et al., 2021). Attention performance has also been studied in music selection: when users listen to preferred background music during low-demanding sustained-attention tasks, their focus increases and mind-wandering decreases (Kiss and Linnell, 2020). This research likely inspired products such as Neurosity’s Crown, a helmet style head piece marketed to programmers with disposable income that notices when focus and flow drift and changes the genre of music to nurture the user’s flow. This product hints towards attention control research attracting hardware investments, including some superfluous devices for the rich. I suspect other companies will try and outshine Neurosity’s Crown, it wouldn’t be hard to do as their website is suspiciously vague and limited on information. 

From the Neurodesign resource document, (Liu et al., 2021), a recent study looked specifically at transmeridian flights that require pilots to have sustained attention for long periods. Fatigue and difficulty concentrating are common during such flights. Researchers used a functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to track changes in attention levels by way of a computer system designed to detect if the pilot disengages from the controls. If so, it sends a reminder to engage with ground control, for example. Research in this sector that helps pilots in these extreme conditions is likely to benefit all pilots. This research is software based but makes me wonder if there will come a time when pilots are wearing an evolved version of Neurosity’s Crown or some competitor’s version.   

A recent eye tracking study adds another layer of complexity to attention research: looking at differences in visual attention given two types of thinking, analytic and holistic. Previous research suggests that analytical thinking is common in individualistic cultures and promotes attention to detail and focus on the most important aspects of a scene. Whereas holistic thinking is common in collectivist cultures and promotes attention to the overall structure of a scene and the internal relationships between components. The study by Alotaibi et al. (2017) compared groups from Great Britain, an individualist culture, and Saudi Arabia, a collectivist culture, both given the same visual search task: examining a simple natural scene. The results showed a higher overall number of fixations for Saudi participants along with longer search times, in other words, less efficient search behavior than British participants. These findings suggest that there is a positive relationship between an analytic cognitive style and controlled attention. This suggests that our attention and searching behaviors are partially influenced by our families and our cultures without us always noticing. As designers we need to be aware of the multitude of differences that humans experience. Unfortunately, depth of cultural impacts on our behavior is not discussed enough.  

In the realm of social media, one study (Hashash et al., 2019) found that texting while driving is worse than social media browsing in terms of driving performance, although both are dangerous behaviors. Regardless, these dangers are not taken seriously enough by drivers. Some assume that only younger generations are texting while driving or browsing social media, but older drivers also use their phones while driving causing many crashes to occur. Addiction to social media and smartphones is affecting people both young and old. Another recent eye tracking study (Vraga et al., 2019) demonstrated that attention to social media posts is not associated with interest in the content; our attention is engaged even when a post is about something we don’t like or agree with. According to Kane (2019), some users feel helpless when it comes to controlling the amount of time that they spend on their devices. Digital products are in fact designed to be engaging and attention-grabbing and therefore nurture habit-forming behavior in young people. Some experience withdrawal when devices are taken away. 

            Mindfulness apps have become more popular over the past ten years as many Americans experience and deal with chronic anxiety. Part of the anxiety increase is due to the round-the-clock availability of social media: addictive distractions that result in avoidance of necessary tasks and builds anxiety. Substance abuse is another focus of attention especially since the pandemic. One team in China developed an app to help people with substance use disorders using attention bias modification interventions to change their behavior. This app is needed because in conventional psychology therapy there are gaps between treatment sessions during which users can revert to addictive behaviors resulting in relapses. The research team saw successful results from their intervention app but wants to improve the design through participatory design sessions. The research described in Zhang et al., 2019 is the first one of its kind in Asia and hopefully more research into this area will be funded. 

Studies of activities that require Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) have shown that divided attention over long periods of time can enhance aspects of attention. One example is action video games, since there are frequently changing objects on the screen that the user must pay attention to in order to be successful. Bavelier & Green (2019) reported some early results showing improved attention, visual information processing speed, and working memory in young and in older adults as result of game activity. Discovering a positive benefit from playing action video games is encouraging because of their immense popularity but removing violence from them and expecting the appeal to remain is hard to fathom in this country. 

Taking all of this in, we are confronted with an ongoing smartphone dilemma and a complicated space: action video games help improve attention capacity, but addictive social media use fragments our attention, and most gamers also use social media platforms. While China has taken steps to limit the amount of video games people play, it is very unlikely that our government will do something similar.  Realistically, both games and social media are going to be with us for the foreseeable future. Some apps are good for us, but the temptation of staying too long on social media will always be there. We are social creatures and big tech uses that against us, deliberately manipulating our behavior, and gaslighting us when we call them out. Attention has become a commodity driving the technology market, seen by a rising adoption of split-revenue models for advertising, forcing customers to pay with their attention, viewing advertisements as the default, or paying a monthly fee to skip them (Kane 2019). Marketers know we will pay to skip the headache and wasted time of an advertisement.   

Self-help books focusing on attention management have been steadily growing since 2010, but in the past three years alone you can find dozens of these books. One that caught my attention is How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, written by Jenny Odell in 2020, described as a self-help book that turns into a political manifesto arguing against capitalism, and recommended by NPR. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, written by Nir Eyal in 2019, an ethically questionable book about attention management. Eyal argues against reducing time on smartphones, and that if you get distracted by your phone at work that is a symptom of a dysfunctional company culture, not the fault of social media. This gave me concern, and I quickly discovered that Eyal first got a lot of attention for his 2014 book How to Build Habit-Forming Products. This book was on the Wall Street Journal best seller list and is regarded as Silicon Valley’s handbook for making technology habit-forming. 

Learning about Eyal’s books was discouraging, but luckily, I was happily distracted by a couple attention books that include artistic backgrounds. The first book was Attention and Focus in Dance: Enhancing Power, Precision, and Artistry, written by Clare Guss-West, that is rooted in the attentional focus findings of researcher Gabriele Wulf. Clare’s approach helps dancers hone the skills of attention, focus and self-cueing to replenish energy. She saw a need for the book because many dancers use excessive energy deployment and significant counterproductive effort, which results in lack of stamina (Guss-West, 2020). The second book, Forms of Poetic Attention, argues that attention is poetry’s primary medium, and that the forms of attention demanded by a poem can train, hone, and refine our capacities for perception and judgment, on and off the page. She goes on to suggest that poetic language is better understood as an instrument for refining attention, identifying a link between poetic form and the forming of attention (Alford, 2021). Both books opened my mind to a broader potential of attention behavior training, and I hope more books come out that use arts and neuroscience to promote personal improvement.  

Finally, a warning comes from the former director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, Tim Hwang. His book, Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet warns that digital advertising is at risk of collapsing, because most online ads fail to work. Hwang states that the true value of our attention is wildly misrepresented, and the online advertising industry might be facing a crash like the 2008 housing crisis (Hwang, 2020). If the online advertising industry undergoes a major reform, we can safely assume the big tech giants will emerge unharmed. The smaller companies that depend on online advertisement revenue are more likely to be negatively impacted in this new doomsday scenario, because this is America. The research summary provided some silver linings but overall, I am more concerned about our future, knowing that private research conducted by big tech marches on improving the manipulations. The fear does inspire motivation to be an ethical design advocate, hopefully there will be enough people that feel the same way.