Copyright ©Tatar 2006
The Colab project presented difficulties not just becaused participants had problems maintaining shared knowledge (common ground) but also because they were not able to help one another regulate and maintain their attention on the shared task. Attentional engagement is not just the person's focus on something in the environment, but the give-and-take, the flow of attention, as it is mutually regulated by others in the presence of the environment. Sometimes others are a distraction from the environment, sometimes they are the conduit to understanding the environment. An important concept here is foreground and background. Many variables influence the condition and interactions of participants, some "state" (transient factors) and some "trait" (enduring personality tendencies), some individual and some emergent from the interplay of interactive moves.
My doctoral thesis explored the underlying processes of attentional engagement as well its personal and social consequences, in a paradigm in which we created barriers to such engagement. The particular kind of barrier was asking one person, the speaker, to talk while the other person, the listener, was distracted by another task, counting all the "TH's" in the words the listener was uttering. This distraction was not meant to create a situation of total non-responsiveness, but a situation more akin to naturally occuring distraction, which is not normally complete.
The experiment found evidence for a theory of listening in which the interactants display behaviors which implicitly ask for confirmation of attention. When sufficient confirmation is not forthcoming, they increase the amount of "requests." In this case, in which the source of inattention is not visible to the speaker, speakers appear to blame themselves for the poor reaction they garner. Perhaps when you are speaking, it is your job to be interesting enough to keep your listener's attention.
Future work includes the exploration of different kinds of inattention over time. Additional questions involve the relationship between personal variables, such as self-confidence (self-efficacy, stereotype vulnerability, etc.), and the interpretation of speaking and listening behavior.