Interference between conversation and a concurrent visuomotor task.

Abstract

We report two experiments during which participants conversed with either a confederate (Experiment 1) or a close friend (Experiment 2) while tracking a moving target on a computer screen. In both experiments, talking led to worse performance on the tracking task than listening. We attribute this finding to the increased cognitive demands of speech planning and monitoring. Growth Curve Analyses of task performance during the beginning and end of conversation segments revealed dynamical changes in the impact of conversation on visuomotor task performance, with increasing impact during the beginning of speaking segments and decreasing impact during the beginning of listening segments. At the end of speaking and listening segments, this pattern reversed. These changes became more pronounced with increased difficulty of the task. Together, these results show that the planning and monitoring aspects of conversation require the majority of the attentional resources that are also used for non-linguistic visuomotor tasks. The fact that similar results were obtained when conversing with both a confederate and a friend indicates that our findings apply to a wide range of conversational situations. This is the first study to show the fine-grained time course of the shifting attentional demands of conversation on a concurrently performed visuomotor task.

Planning versus comprehension in turn-taking: Fast responders show reduced anticipatory processing of the question

“…Note that this point occurred an average of 2.4 s before the end of the question for the condition in which it was possible for participants to plan their responses early (see Bögels et al, 2015a, Table 1). These results then suggest that participants begin planning their responses as early as possible, contrasting with the conclusions from the other response-planning studies described above (Boiteau et al, 2014;Sjerps and Meyer, 2015).…”

“…Of these, two have used a dual-task paradigm in which participants were asked to take turns at talk while simultaneously performing an additional task. One study asked participants to spontaneously converse with someone while also using a mouse to track a visual target on a computer monitor (Boiteau et al, 2014). Participants' ability to track the visual target was most impacted just before and during speaking, suggesting that listeners start planning only just before the end of the previous turn.…”

“…Sjerps and Meyer (2015) argue that their method measures the most cognitively demanding aspects of planning, but it may be that these kinds of motor tasks (finger tapping and mouse tracking) primarily interfere with the execution of another motor task-speaking-and not the entire arc of response planning. Additionally, while Boiteau et al (2014) used an ecologically valid task (natural conversation), they did so at the cost of not being able to control the speech being comprehended and produced. For example, we do not know when during the interlocutor's turn the participant had enough information to start planning his or her response.…”

Coordinating Utterances During Turn-Taking: The Role of Prediction, Response Preparation, and Articulation

“…Additional research has found that the extent of advance planning is fairly flexible (Konopka, 2012;Swets, Jacovina, & Gerrig, 2013;Van de Velde, Meyer, & Konopka, 2014), which may explain the discrepancies in results of Boiteau et al (2014), Sjerps and Meyer (2015), and . For example, Konopka found that increasing the familiarity of sentence structure (through repetition) and lexical items (by manipulating frequency and recent usage) increased speakers' scope of response preparation from one to two words.…”

“…Using this method, Boiteau, Malone, Peters, and Almor (2014) found that listeners' performance on a visuomotor tracking task declined toward the end of their interlocutor's turn, suggesting they began preparing their own response toward the end of the speaker's utterance. Sjerps and Meyer (2015) found similar results (using a finger-tapping task), even when participants knew which row of pictures they would have to describe as soon as the speaker produced their first word and could prepare a response in advance of the turn-end.…”