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Attentional or cognitive ‘tunneling’ is a behavior referring to an operator’s attentional fixation on one task or channel of information, resulting in the neglect of others. The two most common behavioral measures are those that capture the ‘neglect’ aspect. For example, measuring whether a person misses (or near-misses) a rare event, and whether there is performance degradation on the other tasks in the environment. Two factors routinely influence whether tunneling occurs: compellingness of task symbology or the display, and general difficulty. While both have been studied in isolation, they are also potentially interactive. A direct comparison for which element is more influential has not been examined. Using the Multi-Attribute Task Battery, with two-dimensional attributes of compellingness, and a task-instability, a 2 x 2 compellingness (compelling or not) versus difficulty (low or high) treatment was implemented under multitasking conditions of performance. Tunneling outcomes were measured through performance on the competing tasks within the platform and reaction to a rare event at the end of the experimental session. Findings suggest that difficulty is a stronger influence on tunneling than the compellingness manipulation, but there is an interaction effect where a task that is both compelling and difficult leads to the worst performance on the competing task (and thus, the most tunneling). The same combined effect also leads to degraded responses to the off-nominal event. Together this dissertation expands the knowledge around tunneling and its prediction, leading to applied implications for design, accident investigation, and continued research.