Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

To stay focused on their chosen tasks, people have to inhibit distractions. The underlying attention control skills canimprove through reinforcement learning, which can be accelerated by giving feedback. We applied the theory of metacog-nitive reinforcement learning to develop a training app that gives people optimal feedback on their attention control whilethey are working or studying. In an eight-day field experiment with 99 participants, we investigated the effect of this train-ing on peoples productivity, sustained attention, and self-control. Compared to a control condition without feedback, wefound that participants receiving optimal feedback learned to focus increasingly better (f = .08, p ¡ .01) and achieved higherproductivity scores (f = .19, p ¡ .01) during the training. In addition, they evaluated their productivity more accurately (r =.12, p ¡.01). However, due to asymmetric attrition problems, these findings need to be taken with a grain of salt.