Cognitive Aid Design Using Diminished Reality to Support Selective Attention by Reducing Distraction

Objective We conducted two experiments to understand the effects of computationally diminishing reality on performance, awareness of the environment, and subjective workload. Background Advances in extended reality (XR) technologies make it possible to alter or remove auditory and visual distractions from an environment. Though distractions are known to harm performance, there is no work examining the effects of removal via XR. Method Across two samples, STEM graduate students and Johnson Space Center employees, the effects of reducing distraction during a novel, demanding assembly task via a form of XR (diminished reality) were compared to a full distraction control condition, studied in a virtual reality (VR) environment. In one condition, participants experienced universal attenuation of distractions. In a second condition, attenuation was context-aware: only nontask objects were made less visible and only unimportant off-task audio was eliminated. Results Both experiments found subjective workload could be lowered via a Diminished reality (DR) aid. The STEM graduate student sample showed a benefit of a DR aid for performance and environment awareness; however, the sample of professionals from Johnson Space Center showed no performance differences with the DR aids. There were mixed results regarding awareness of the location of objects and events outside of the assembly task. Conclusion DR aids can have effects similar to those seen in studies that removed distractions entirely. More work is needed to understand the match between distraction removal design and task. Application These findings contribute to the development of a class of XR aids: Diminished Reality.