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It is not good to talk : conversation has a fixed interference cost on attention regardless of difficulty
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Kunar, Melina A., Cole, Louise, Cox, Angeline and Ocampo, Jessica (2018) It is not good to talk : conversation has a fixed interference cost on attention regardless of difficulty. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 3 . 33. doi:10.1186/s41235-018-0124-5 ISSN 2365-7464.
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-018-0124-5
Abstract
It is well-documented that telephone conversations lead to impaired driving performance. Kunar et al. (Psychon Bull Rev 15:1135–1140, 2008) showed that this deficit was, in part, due to a dual-task cost of conversation on sustained visual attention. Using a multiple object tracking (MOT) task they found that the act of conversing on a hands-free telephone resulted in slower response times and increased errors compared to when participants performed the MOT task alone. The current study investigates whether the dual-task impairment of conversation on sustained attention is affected by conversation difficulty or task difficulty, and whether there was a dual-task deficit on attention when participants overheard half a conversation. Experiment 1 manipulated conversation difficulty by asking participants to discuss either easy questions or difficult questions. The results showed that there was no difference in the dual-task cost depending on conversation difficulty. Experiment 2 showed a similar dual-task deficit of attention in both an easy and a difficult visual search task. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that in contrast to work using a dot tracking and choice reaction time task (Emberson et al., Psychol Sci 21:1383–1388, 2010), there was little deficit on MOT performance of hearing half a conversation, provided people heard the conversations in their native language. The results are discussed in terms of a resource-depleted account of attentional resources showing a fixed conversational-interference cost on attention.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology H Social Sciences > HE Transportation and Communications |
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Divisions: | Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Science > Psychology | ||||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Distracted driving -- Psychological apsects, Attention -- Testing, Communication and traffic, Cell phones | ||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications | ||||||||
Publisher: | Springer International Publishing | ||||||||
ISSN: | 2365-7464 | ||||||||
Official Date: | December 2018 | ||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 3 | ||||||||
Article Number: | 33 | ||||||||
DOI: | 10.1186/s41235-018-0124-5 | ||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 31 August 2018 | ||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 31 August 2018 |
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