Measuring the dynamics of attentional capture in hand and eye movements with virtual reality

Abstract Laboratory investigations of attentional capture typically use two-dimensional displays and button-press responses, which may limit their generalizability to everyday experiences. The current study used a virtual reality (VR) system to measure the dynamics of attentional capture by simultaneously recording participants’ ( N = 54) hand and eye movements as they completed a modified additional singleton task. In both a sparsely detailed and richly detailed virtual environment, participants reached to select a uniquely shaped target that was accompanied by a uniquely colored distractor on 50% of trials. We observed robust attentional capture costs across our measures of hand and eye movements, with greater latencies in initiation and movement times, larger reach curvatures, more overall eye movement, and delayed first target fixations on distractor-present trials. Three-dimensional target attraction and distractor attraction scores provided sensitive measures of the time course of attentional capture and allowed for more direct interpretations of performance than reach curvature. Although initiation times, response times, gaze distances, and target fixation proportions were elevated in the richly detailed environment relative to the sparsely detailed environment, we failed to observe a significant interaction between environmental detail and attentional capture costs in any of our measures. Taken together, our results demonstrate the feasibility of using VR to examine the dynamics of attentional capture in immersive virtual environments with richer, more continuous behavioral measures.