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Telephone conversation impairs sustained visual attention via a central bottleneck
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Kunar, Melina A., Carter, Randall, Cohen, Michael and Horowitz , Todd S. (2008) Telephone conversation impairs sustained visual attention via a central bottleneck. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Vol.15 (No.6). pp. 1135-1140. doi:10.3758/PBR.15.6.1135 ISSN 1069-9384.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/PBR.15.6.1135
Abstract
Recent research has shown that holding telephone conversations disrupts one's driving ability. We asked whether this effect could be attributed to a visual attention impairment. In Experiment 1, participants conversed on a telephone or listened to a narrative while engaged in multiple object tracking (MOT), a task requiring sustained visual attention. We found that MOT was disrupted in the telephone conversation condition, relative to single-task MOT performance, but that listening to a narrative had no effect. In Experiment 2, we asked which component of conversation might be interfering with MOT performance. We replicated the conversation and single-task conditions of Experiment 1 and added two conditions in which participants heard a sequence of words over a telephone. In the shadowing condition, participants simply repeated each word in the sequence. In the generation condition, participants were asked to generate a new word based on each word in the sequence. Word generation interfered with MOT performance, but shadowing did not. The data indicate that telephone conversation disrupts attention at a central stage, the act of generating verbal stimuli, rather than at a peripheral stage, such as listening or speaking.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||
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Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology | ||||
Divisions: | Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Science > Psychology | ||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Visual perception, Oral communication, Cellular telephone systems, Automobile driving | ||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Psychonomic Bulletin & Review | ||||
Publisher: | Psychonomic Society, Inc. | ||||
ISSN: | 1069-9384 | ||||
Official Date: | 2008 | ||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | Vol.15 | ||||
Number: | No.6 | ||||
Page Range: | pp. 1135-1140 | ||||
DOI: | 10.3758/PBR.15.6.1135 | ||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | ||||
Funder: | National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (NIH), Harvard Medical School Office for Diversity and Community Partnership, Gustavus and Louise Pfeiffer Research Foundation | ||||
Grant number: | MH 65576 (NIH), Project Success (Harvard) |
Data sourced from Thomson Reuters' Web of Knowledge
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