Testing divided attention : an honors thesis (HONRS 499)

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine if auditory distraction would affect performance on a series of spatial tasks. Subjects were given various levels of distraction and mean reaction times and errors made were compared among the four groups. Level of auditory distraction did not significantly affect the ability of subjects to perform spatial tasks. When asked to describe the distraction, 95.6% of subjects could do so correctly, but only 47.6% of subjects were able to correctly identify the meaning of the messages within the distraction.