Distractibility

Synonyms

Easily sidetracked; Inattentiveness; Poor concentration

Definition

Distractibility is the difficulty in maintaining attention or a tendency to be easily diverted from the task at hand (American Psychological Association Dictionary of Psychology 2007).

Introduction

Efficient learning, problem solving, and task performance require that attention be focused selectively on information that is relevant to the task, while task-irrelevant distractors are ignored. Individuals often fail to ignore distractors, and those who report a greater frequency of such attention failures are at increased risk for inefficiencies, accidents, and degraded task performance that can be of minor or major consequence. Sources of distraction can be external (e.g., background noise, a peripheral image) or internal (e.g., mind-wandering, daydreaming) and can involve information presented in the same modality (e.g., visual target-visual distractor) or across modalities (e.g., visual target-auditory...