Emerging perspectives on distraction and task interruptions—Part III: contexts, mechanisms, and metacognitive blind spots

The articles in Part III of our Special Issue “Emerging Perspectives on Distraction and Task Interruptions”, extend the theoretical and empirical themes introduced in Parts I and II. This issue presents seven new empirical studies conducted to advance understanding of distraction and task interruptions. Parts I and II highlighted how factors such as metacognitive monitoring (one’s awareness of being distracted), task controllability (through forewarning), and individual differences (why some people are more vulnerable to distraction than others) influence the impact of interference. The authors contributing to Part III report new evidence clarifying how and when distraction disrupts performance. They explore specific situations, including task interruptions and background speech during reading. In this editorial, we summarise the key findings of each study and then reflect on how they collectively contribute to broader theoretical frameworks including interference-by-process (Jones & Tremblay, Citation2000; Linklater et al., Citation2024; Marsh et al., Citation2008, Citation2009), memory-based mechanisms of distraction (e.g. Richardson et al., Citation2023; Röer et al., Citation2017), and metacognitive accounts of distractor awareness (Bell et al., Citation2021; Kattner & Bryce, Citation2022). Empirical phenomena such as conditional interference, metacognitive illusions of distraction, and distraction-induced facilitation are highlighted as part of an emerging research trend, marked by a growing focus on these effects within experimental research on distraction. In the following sections, we organise the studies by thematic focus to offer a clear and structured overview.