Researchers have uncovered fresh insights into the reasons why notifications or pop-ups so easily capture our focus. It appears that human attention operates on a cyclical basis, fluctuating approximately seven to ten times every second. This rhythmic pattern plays a vital role in survival mechanisms, as it stops individuals from fixating too intensely on a single element within their surroundings. For example, it enables people to notice a vehicle reversing in a parking area while hunting for their own parked car, or to dodge a protruding tree limb during a stroll while observing a child cycling nearby.
Nevertheless, these recurring attentional transition periods can render us more prone to interruptions, particularly in today’s technology-saturated world. With constant exposure to screens, digital notifications, and various visual cues, these inherent and regular opportunities for attention to wander make it far simpler to veer off from ongoing activities.
Our early human predecessors benefited greatly from this characteristic, as they needed to vigilantly scan their surroundings for potential threats even while gathering sustenance, explained Ian Fiebelkorn, Ph.D., an assistant professor of Neuroscience at the University of Rochester’s Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience and the lead author on a research paper published in PLOS Biology. In contrast, contemporary settings filled with open laptops and ever-present smartphones transform these rhythmic attentional shifts from assets into liabilities. Essentially, the same periodic openings that once aided adaptive scanning now heighten vulnerability to irrelevant interruptions.
Uncovering Invisible Attentional Shifts
Such attentional fluctuations happen innumerable times throughout a single day, numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Zach Redding, Ph.D. ’24, a postdoctoral researcher in Fiebelkorn’s laboratory and the primary author of this investigation, employed electroencephalogram technology to track cerebral electrical activity. The study involved 40 participants who were instructed to concentrate on a faint gray square positioned centrally on a monitor, ignoring surrounding colored dots designed as distractions. To maintain data purity, any recorded eye movements were filtered out, guaranteeing that the results captured purely endogenous attentional dynamics rather than mere gaze directions.
Analysis of the EEG data exposed distinct oscillatory signatures corresponding to moments when attention was primed to drift toward distractors. These oscillations manifested at a frequency of roughly seven to ten cycles per second and correlated directly with participants’ fluctuating performance in detecting targets—alternating between phases of superior and inferior accuracy. Notably, during intervals of diminished target identification, subjects displayed markedly heightened responsiveness to the distracting stimuli.
This discovery holds promising implications for broader applications, such as investigating attentional profiles in individuals diagnosed with ADHD, potentially illuminating the roots of hyperfocus or excessive distractibility. Our findings demonstrate that standard brain function involves rhythmic toggling between two primary states: one enhancing processing within the current attentional spotlight and another facilitating resource reallocation to novel locations, elaborated Fiebelkorn. In those with ADHD, this toggling might occur less frequently, thereby diminishing cognitive adaptability. Future extensions of this work could pave the way for innovative interventions aimed at bolstering concentration abilities.
Additional contributors to the study included Yun Ding, Ph.D., a postdoctoral associate working within the Fiebelkorn laboratory.
The research, titled ‘Frequency-specific attentional mechanisms phasically modulate the influence of distractors on task performance,’ appeared in PLOS Biology in 2026, with DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003664.
