SAGE Journal Articles
Click on the following links. Please note these will open in a new window.
Abstract
People often have to listen to someone speak in the presence of competing voices. Much is known about the acoustic cues used to overcome this challenge, but almost nothing is known about the utility of cues derived from experience with particular voices—cues that may be particularly important for older people and others with impaired hearing. Here, we use a version of the coordinate-response-measure procedure to show that people can exploit knowledge of a highly familiar voice (their spouse’s) not only to track it better in the presence of an interfering stranger’s voice, but also, crucially, to ignore it so as to comprehend a stranger’s voice more effectively. Although performance declines with increasing age when the target voice is novel, there is no decline when the target voice belongs to the listener’s spouse. This finding indicates that older listeners can exploit their familiarity with a speaker’s voice to mitigate the effects of sensory and cognitive decline.
Discussion questions:
- Explain the “cocktail-party problem” discussed in this article. How does the task used in this study relate to this phenomenon?
- Why did these researchers focus on older adults in this study?
- How did the presence of a familiar voice speaking in the task affect the performance of the subjects? What did the researchers conclude from these results?
Abstract
Objective: This study investigates the effect of cognitive load on guidance of visual attention. Background: Previous studies have shown that cognitive load can undermine driving performance, particularly drivers' ability to detect safety-critical events. Cognitive load combined with the loss of exogenous cues, which can occur when the driver briefly glances away from the roadway, may be particularly detrimental. Method: In each of two experiments, twelve participants engaged in an auditory task while performing a change detection task. A change blindness paradigm was implemented to mask exogenous cues by periodically blanking the screen in a driving simulator while a change occurred. Performance measures included participants' sensitivity to vehicle changes and confidence in detecting them. Results: Cognitive load uniformly diminished participants' sensitivity and confidence, independent of safety relevance or lack of exogenous cues. Periodic blanking, which simulated glances away from the roadway, undermined change detection to a greater degree than did cognitive load; however, drivers' confidence in their ability to detect changes was diminished more by cognitive load than by periodic blanking. Conclusion: Cognitive load and short glances away from the road are additive in their tendency to increase the likelihood of drivers missing safety-critical events. Application: This study demonstrates the need to consider the combined consequence of cognitive load and brief glances away from the road in the design of emerging in-vehicle devices and the need to provide drivers with better feedback regarding these consequences.
Discussion questions:
- How did the researchers manipulate “cognitive load” in this study? How does this relate to multitasking in daily life?
- Explain the difference between “endogenous control” and “exogenous control” as they relate to driving performance.
- From the results of their study, what did the authors conclude about the effect of cognitive load on driving performance? What implication do these results have for cell phone use while driving?
Abstract
Selective attention is an intrinsic component of perceptual representation in a visual system that is hierarchically organized. Modulatory signals originate in brain regions that represent behavioral goals; these signals specify which perceptual objects are to be represented by sensory neurons that are subject to contextual modulation. Attention can be deployed to spatial locations, features, or objects, and corresponding modulatory signals must be targeted within these domains. Open questions include how nonspatial perceptual domains are modulated by attention and how abstract goals are transformed into targeted modulatory signals.
Discussion questions:
- Explain what the author means by “selective attention.” Can you think of some examples from your daily life?
- Describe some of the brain areas involved in these attention tasks. What is some of the evidence that these brain areas are involved in these tasks?
- Explain what the authors mean by “attention modulation.” How does this relate to selective attention?