Research on Attention Guidance and User Autonomy in AI-Powered Immersive Environments

As artificial intelligence gets deeply embedded into immersive environments, attention-guiding technology delivers ever more precise and efficient outcomes. Still, this improved efficiency carries an overlooked design risk: excessive AI guidance may steadily erode user agency and undermine exploratory behaviors as well as the process of meaning-making. This paper builds a critical conceptual framework to rethink attention-oriented design within AI-driven immersive settings. It defines excessive guidance and establishes theoretical links between this concept and three core facets of user agency: perceived control, voluntary choice and decision-making authority. Based on these findings, the paper calls for a paradigm shift from attention optimization to curiosity-led design. It also puts forward actionable behavioral measurement indicators covering exploration scope, average dwell time, path-following ratio, active choice frequency and recall test performance. The proposed framework supplies a new theoretical tool for human-computer interaction research in immersive scenarios and helps shift AI's role from a fixed route provider to an exploratory collaborator.