I find these to generally be symptoms of an issue with the game's pace and the stakes in the scene which can be corrected on the DM side of the screen. I find that the players who love combat also like social interaction and exploration challenges when there are real stakes and tight pacing. Same goes for the ones who prefer social interaction/exploration. It's when these challenges drag or they don't appear to have a point to them or any compelling win or loss conditions that people start to check out in my experience.
That makes sense to a point, but I'm not going to turn everything into a game with win/loss conditions. Sometimes I just want to describe a scene in a way that you can better settle into character and start making decisions beyond the normal what-skills-am-i-proficient-in ones. Other times I just need to make sure that players aren't conditioned to know that I start describing something in detail that it must be important to a challenge.
More importantly, I think these types are often just coming from a gaming background where "character development" means getting better skills and gear or is non-existent. Everything else is minutiae. The guy I mentioned earlier actually reminds me a lot of someone who joined a session back in high school. He was an older guy who's gaming experience topped out at the Parker Brothers side of things. He was honestly confused about why the smell of a room mattered, or why the GM was describing how sturdy a lock. His reasoning was something along the lines of "When I play monopoly, I'm technically a real estate investor -- but I couldn't care less what the houses look like because it doesn't factor into my decisions." To him, it didn't matter if the lock was sturdy looking or not because he was going to try and break it either way.