Paying attention to speech: The role of working memory capacity and professional experience
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Paying attention to speech: The role of working memory capacity and professional experience Bar Lambez 1 & Galit Agmon 1 & Paz Har-Shai Yahav 1 & Yuri Rassovsky 1,2,3 & Elana Zion Golumbic 1
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract Managing attention in multispeaker environments is a challenging feat that is critical for human performance. However, why some people are better than others in allocating attention appropriately remains highly unknown. Here, we investigated the contribution of two factors—working memory capacity (WMC) and professional experience—to performance on two different types of attention task: selective attention to one speaker and distributed attention among multiple concurrent speakers. We compared performance across three groups: individuals with low (n = 20) and high (n = 25) WMC, and aircraft pilots (n = 24), whose profession poses extremely high demands for both selective and distributed attention to speech. Results suggests that selective attention is highly effective, with good performance maintained under increasingly adverse conditions, whereas performance decreases substantially with the requirement to distribute attention among a larger number of speakers. Importantly, both types of attention benefit from higher WMC, suggesting reliance on some common capacity-limited resources. However, only selective attention was further improved in the pilots, pointing to its flexible and trainable nature, whereas distributed attention seems to suffer from more fixed and severe processing bottlenecks. Keywords Auditory attention . Speech processing . Cocktail party . Selective . Distributed
Natural environments are characterized by an abundance of sounds that bombard the auditory system and compete for our attention. To maneuver successfully in adverse listening settings, the auditory system needs to segregate concurrent sound sources (Bregman, 1990; Pérez, Guevara López, Silva, & Ramos, 2015; Sussman, 2017) and apply attention to appropriately select only the relevant parts of the acoustic scene (Kahneman, 1973; Kaya & Elhilali, 2017; McDermott, 2009). However, focusing attention appropriately on relevant speech is a feat that many individuals find extremely challenging. Moreover, different contexts may require applying different attentional strategies. Some tasks require selective attention (i.e., focusing on a single speech source while ignoring all others and avoiding distraction; Beaman, Bridges, & Scott, 2007; Broadbent, 1954; Cherry, 1953; Elliott & Briganti, * Elana Zion Golumbic [email protected] 1
The Gonda Multidisciplinary Center for Brain Research, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
2
Department of Psychology, Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel
3
The Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
2012; Treisman, 1964a; Zion Golumbic et al., 2013), whereas other contexts require precisely the opposite: distributing attention among several speakers and gleaning semantic information from a
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