Fig. 1

The virtual seminar room (VSR) into which the participants immersed via a head-mounted display. A First-person view of the virtual seminar room in which the continuous performance task is presented on the canvas at the front wall. B Real world side view of participant in the virtual reality lab. C One of the distractor events played during a distractor phase: avatar in the front is standing up and walking to a cabinet, thereby attracting the attention of the participant as indicated by the visualized pink gaze vector (not visible for study participants). D Gaze-based feedback provision. Whenever the participant’s gaze shifted away from the canvas for more than 2 s or the gaze was directed at a distractor for at least 0.5 s, audiovisual feedback was automatically played (combined black fade-in and sound effect). For a video presentation of this feedback, see Supplementary Material 1