Using gesture and movement to avoid "Pop Outs" in (pronunciation) teaching!

I like this study. One of the biggest obstacles in effective teaching (of anything) are sudden distractions, when what should have "popped in" easily in a lesson . . . doesn't . . . because of what just "popped out or up." Interesting piece of research by Klink et al,  on visual distraction--and a potential strategy for dealing with it, summarized by Neurosciencenews.com, Trained Brains Rapidly Suppress Visual Distractions. Title of the original study, published on PNAS: Inversion of pop-out for a distracting feature dimension in monkey visual cortex, (Ignore that term "monkey" in the original there!)

In essence the "subjects" were trained as followed (from the summary):

"The researchers trained monkeys to play a video game in which they searched for a unique shape among multiple items, while a uniquely colored item tried to distract them. As soon as the monkeys found the unique shape, they made an eye movement to it to indicate their choice. After some training, monkeys became very good at this game and almost never made eye movements to the distractor."

So what is a potential application of that "discovery" in teaching? What visual distractions are your students subject to in the classroom? On a task by task basis, how do you maintain student attention to the focus of the activity? 

For example, in haptic pronunciation teaching, instructor and students do a great deal of repeating words, phrases, sentences and dialogues together (not repeating after) while using speech-synchronized gestures continuously. In this choreographed technique, what we call "movement, tone and touch techniques" (MT3s) it is essential that instructor and student gesturing is constantly synchronized, throughout. You can "SEE" just how disruptive a visual distraction in the room in the visual fields of students could be. 

On the flip side, however, you can also "SEE" how MT3 training, itself--or even typical gesture use in teaching or communication, whether designed or impromptu, can, in principle, serve to enhance general visual attention in the classroom. 

How free of distraction or immune to it is the visual field in your classroom? Can you manage it better, more "movingly?" 

Source: Klink, P., Teeuwen, R., Lorteije, J. and P. Roelfsema. (2023). Inversion of pop-out for a distracting feature dimension in monkey visual cortex. PNAS February 22, 2023  https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2210839120