Mapping Attention Across Multiple Media Tasks

Paying attention to media requires continuously selecting and processing relevant information while filtering out numerous competing stimuli. Although the factors that drive attention toward or away from a single media task are relatively well characterized, there is a lack of understanding regarding how attention to media functions in the presence of multiple, concurrent tasks. In this manuscript, we report findings from four experiments investigating this question. Results indicate that, rather than attention being based on a strict hierarchy between “primary” and “secondary” tasks, attentional resources are distributed across concurrent media tasks based on the (relative) rewardingness and effortfulness of each task. More rewarding tasks elicited more attention, and the attention-capturing influence of rewarding “secondary” tasks was magnified when the “primary” task was more cognitively effortful. These results provide support for recent theoretical advancements in media psychology research and point to promising future directions using updated models of motivated attention to predict the allocation of attentional resources across multiple concurrent tasks.

关注媒体内容需持续选择与处理相关信息，同时筛选众多相互竞争的刺激。尽管驱动注意力向单一媒体任务集中或分散的因素已被相对充分地描述，但对于在多个并发任务并存的情况下，媒体注意力如何发挥作用，尚缺乏深入了解。在本篇论文中，我们报告了四项实验的研究成果，旨在探讨这一问题。研究结果表明，注意力并非基于“主要”与“次要”任务之间严格的层次结构，而是根据每个任务的（相对）奖励性和努力程度，在并发媒体任务间分配注意资源。更具奖励性的任务能够吸引更多的注意力，且当“主要”任务认知上更具挑战性时，“次要”任务的吸引力在奖励性方面得到了放大。这些发现为媒体心理学研究领域的近期理论进展提供了支持，并指出了利用更新的动机注意力模型预测多任务并发情况下注意资源分配的潜在研究方向。