Don't Get Distracted

Name: Marie Plowman (’27)
Major: Psychology
Hometown: Spokane Valley, Wash.

I am a rising senior psychology major with a research concentration and a communications minor, and I am very grateful to be among the amazing students chosen for the Morris Fellowship this summer. It is so important for research in the arts and sciences to be recognized, funded and shared.

I have been working on a research project since January 2026 exploring the impact TikTok, a short‑form video platform, has on students’ attention and distractibility. We conduct this research using a visual attention task and an eye tracker. Participants are randomly assigned to either the TikTok or TED Talk group, which determines the type of media they watch prior to completing the attention task.

After watching their assigned video(s), participants are calibrated to the eye tracker, which monitors the pupil of their left eye while they complete a visual search task on a computer. This task involves consecutively searching for the letter T among many rotated Ls on the screen. On half of the trials, the T is present; on the other half, it is absent. A distractor − an L in a different color − appears on half of the trials to replicate the distractions and interruptions present in daily life. My preliminary results suggest that participants in the TikTok condition were more distracted by the singleton color distractor during the attention task than those in the TED Talk group.

During this fellowship, I have enjoyed connecting with the other fellows and learning about their research. All of our topics are so different yet so important and timely. I am very grateful for this experience as I have learned how complicated the research process can be, but also how rewarding it is. I have appreciated working with my research advisor, Psychology Professor Doug Addleman, throughout my project and collaborating with him on ideas for future studies.

Throughout my research experience, I have learned coding processes through MATLAB and OpenSesame, gained more than 35 hours of in‑person participant lab experience, and begun developing skills in the statistical software R to examine self‑report and eye‑tracking data. I am also looking forward to presenting my research locally and nationally this next year.

All of this has been an amazing experience as I apply for psychology Ph.D. programs this fall with the long‑term goal of becoming a university researcher. Thank you to the Morris family for funding this fellowship and supporting our research at Gonzaga.