The Hotel-Room Problem: A Person × Visual-Environment Framework for Sustained Academic Attention

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Abstract

Academic attention is often studied as if visual environments affect learners uniformly. Yet students differ in attentional control, sensory responsiveness, motivation, and the environments they select or modify. This conceptual integrative review connects research on visual complexity and clutter with personality dynamics, cognitive control, and educational attention. It distinguishes image-computable cues, relational properties, and subjective appraisals; separates capture, mind-wandering, on-task behavior, effort, and learning; and proposes the Visual Environment-Attention Fit (VEAF) framework. VEAF defines fit as a criterion-specific response profile, not a preference score or fixed environmental type. Visual environments may affect academic work through three parallel paths: distractor costs, engagement regulation, and task support. Person attributes, task demands, momentary states, strategic modification, and exposure history condition those paths, while outcomes feed back into later selection and arrangement. Evidence justifies caution about salient task-irrelevant displays, especially for children, but direct person × visual-environment tests remain sparse and heterogeneous. Eight falsifiable propositions and a three-stage, six-module research program therefore target mechanisms, boundary conditions, adaptation, selection, and held-out prediction. VEAF rejects both universal minimalism and untested personalization: progress requires explaining which visual properties affect which learners, through what processes, for which outcomes, and under what conditions.