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The Effects of Switching Non-Spatial Attention During Conversational Turn Taking.

Authors :
Lin G
Carlile S
Source :
Scientific reports [Sci Rep] 2019 May 30; Vol. 9 (1), pp. 8057. Date of Electronic Publication: 2019 May 30.
Publication Year :
2019

Abstract

This study examined the effect of a change in target voice on word recall during a multi-talker conversation. Two experiments were conducted using matrix sentences to assess the cost of a single endogenous switch in non-spatial attention. Performance in a yes-no recognition task was significantly worse when a target voice changed compared to when it remained the same after a turn-taking gap. We observed a decrease in target hit rate and sensitivity, and an increase in masker confusion errors following a change in voice. These results highlight the cognitive demands of not only engaging attention on a new talker, but also of disengaging attention from a previous target voice. This shows that exposure to a voice can have a biasing effect on attention that persists well after a turn-taking gap. A second experiment showed that there was no change in switching performance using different talker combinations. This demonstrates that switching costs were consistent and did not depend on the degree of acoustic differences in target voice characteristics.

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
2045-2322
Volume :
9
Issue :
1
Database :
MEDLINE
Journal :
Scientific reports
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
31147609
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-44560-1