RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Paying Attention to Speech: The Role of Cognitive Capacity and Acquired Experience
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 655274
DO 10.1101/655274
A1 Bar Lambez
A1 Galit Agmon
A1 Paz Har-Shai
A1 Yuri Rassovsky
A1 Elana Zion Golumbic
YR 2019
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/06/18/655274.abstract
AB Managing attention in multi-speaker 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 – Cognitive Capacity and Acquired 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 cognitive capacity (n=26), and Aircraft Pilots (n=25), who have gained extensive experience on both Selective and Distributed attention to speech through their training and profession. Results indicate that both types of Attention benefit from higher Cognitive Capacity, suggesting reliance on 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 hard-wired processing-bottlenecks.