Distraction by Design: Investigating Attentional Capture by Haptic vs. Visual Smartwatch Notifications During Cognitive Tasks

Nikodem and I wrote this proposal together. We traced attention research from Broadbent’s filter model to Lavie’s load theory, connected it to smartwatch notifications and specified an experiment that could run in PsychoPy, down to trial timings and the analysis plan.

A smartwatch sits on the skin, at the edge of vision, so its notifications are hard to ignore. Most research on notifications looks at phones. We asked whether a vibration pulls attention away from a demanding task more than a flash on the watch screen does, and what it does to performance and workload.A smartwatch sits on the skin, at the edge of vision, so its notifications are hard to ignore. Most research on notifications looks at phones. We asked whether a vibration pulls attention away from a demanding task more than a flash on the watch screen does, and what it does to performance and workload.

In the proposed design, each of 54 participants does a Stroop task (name the ink colour, ignore the word) in three blocks of 240 trials. One block has no notifications. In the other two, a Wear OS watch either vibrates or flashes its screen white for 200 ms, 20 times per block. All six block orders are used, nine participants each, and everyone wears headphones playing pink noise so the vibration can't be heard. The measures are the slowdown on the trials after each notification compared with the trials just before it, accuracy, recovery, and workload on the NASA-TLX after each block.

Theories of attention point both ways. A vibration on the skin may pull attention to the wrist, while a flash competes with the Stroop word for vision. So the comparison is tested two-sided, with an equivalence test so that a null result can be read as well. A power analysis gives 52 participants, rounded up to 54 so every block order has nine. No data have been collected, and the proposal reports no results.

The outcome would tell designers whether to choose notification modality with the user's current task in mind, or to focus on when notifications arrive.