The Effects of Switching Non-Spatial Attention During Conversational Turn Taking

Abstract

This study examined the effect of a change in target voice on word recall during a multi-talker conversation. Two experiments were conducted using matrix sentences to assess the cost of a single endogenous switch in non-spatial attention. Performance in a yes-no recognition task was significantly worse when a target voice changed compared to when it remained the same after a turn-taking gap. We observed a decrease in target hit rate and sensitivity, and an increase in masker confusion errors following a change in voice. These results highlight the cognitive demands of not only engaging attention on a new talker, but also of disengaging attention from a previous target voice. This shows that exposure to a voice can have a biasing effect on attention that persists well after a turn-taking gap. A second experiment showed that there was no change in switching performance using different talker combinations. This demonstrates that switching costs were consistent and did not depend on the degree of acoustic differences in target voice characteristics.

Revealing Perceptional and Cognitive Mechanisms in Static and Dynamic Cocktail Party Listening by Means of Error Analyses

“…However, in this study, all three competing sentences were uttered by the same voice and switches were only spatial, which may explain the discrepancies with their follow-up study (Lin & Carlile, 2019), which only included switches of the target voice. Comparing the findings of the two studies by Lin and Carlile and the present study, one could suggest that either the absence of spatial cues (Lin & Carlile, 2019) facilitates bias effects or that listeners become more easily biased towards a voice than a location. The latter hypothesis begs the question why no problems with attention disengagement could be observed in the present study, even though talkers with distinct voices were used.…”

“…Regarding the confusion errors found in the switch trial (T0), Lin and Carlile (2019) suggested that two different mechanisms are involved when the target voice changes—namely, re-engaging attention to the new target voice, but also disengaging attention from the previous target voice. This seems plausible since listeners may develop an attentional bias towards one talker, which may hinder switching attention to a new talker of interest.…”

“…The mechanisms behind misdirected attention were further examined in the follow-up study by Lin and Carlile (2019) using a setup with two co-located competing talkers with different voices. Two types of switches were used: either the previous target voice became the masker in the next trial (“old voice switch”), or it was replaced with a new voice (“new voice switch”).…”

Effects of Spatial Speech Presentation on Listener Response Strategy for Talker-Identification

“…Lin and Carlile (2015) found that unpredictable location changes of target speech (embedded in simultaneous masker speech) decreased performance in memory recall and speech comprehension across successive turn-taking trials, which was attributed to costly switches in spatial attention, disrupted auditory streaming, and increased cognitive processing load. In addition, the authors reported corresponding effects for changes in target voice, which provoked switches in non-spatial selective attention (Lin and Carlile, 2019).…”

“…Investigations on top-down, intentional control of auditory selective attention (Shinn-Cunningham, 2008) have accrued evidence for a reduction in listening task performance under conditions where the location of a target talker changed vs. stayed constant across trials (Best et al, 2008(Best et al, , 2010Koch et al, 2011;Lawo et al, 2014;Oberem et al, 2014). Such behavioral performance decrements, known as switch-costs, can be caused by repeated switching of selective attention between non-spatial stimulus features (e.g., after changes in target voice gender) (Best et al, 2008;Koch et al, 2011;Koch and Lawo, 2014;Lawo et al, 2014;Lin and Carlile, 2019) as well as between different locations within the auditory scene (Best et al, 2008;Ihlefeld and Shinn-Cunningham, 2008a;Lin and Carlile, 2015) or between ears [e.g., during dichotic listening (Lawo et al, 2014)]. Lin and Carlile (2015) found that unpredictable location changes of target speech (embedded in simultaneous masker speech) decreased performance in memory recall and speech comprehension across successive turn-taking trials, which was attributed to costly switches in spatial attention, disrupted auditory streaming, and increased cognitive processing load.…”