Research report: A registered report on interruptions during visual search:

A research report examines how interruptions affect performance in visual search, focusing on whether the impact comes from perceptual load, cognitive load, or both. Participants performed a visual search task that was interrupted by a running memory-span task. During interruptions, numerical items were either clearly visible (low perceptual load) or masked with Gaussian visual noise (high perceptual load). At the same time, participants recalled either the last item of the list (low cognitive load) or the last four items (high cognitive load). The study used a power analysis in G*Power with α = β = 0.05 and an assumed repeated-measures correlation of ρ = 0.5, concluding that N = 84 would detect a small-to-medium effect (f = 0.2). Testing would continue in additional sessions if fewer than 84 usable datasets were available. Most participants were students at Witten/Herdecke University; sessions lasted about 60 minutes using a within-subject design. The primary task used T-shaped targets among L-shaped distractors, with set sizes of 48 or 72 items.