Extending the triple-task work to haptic search

Delayed Disengagement from Irrelevant Fixation Items (2020) showed that attention stays on an item longer than it needs to before moving on. A small effect, but a reliable one. Because the study used eye tracking, it could not say whether the delay belongs to attention itself or to the oculomotor system that happens to carry attention around in visual search.

The 2025 haptic foraging work pushed at the same question from the other side. Touch-based search behaves differently from visual search once the task gets harder, which raises the possibility that some of what looks attentional in vision is really about the eyes.

So the current study runs a disengagement paradigm in a haptic search task, with no eyes involved. If the delay turns up there as well, the effect is attentional. If it does not, the 2020 result was telling us something about the eyes.