Abstract
Dividing attention over two streams of speech strongly decreases performance compared to focusing on only one. How divided attention affects cognitive processing load as indexed with pupillometry during speech recognition has so far not been investigated. In 12 young adults the pupil response was recorded while they focused on either one or both of two sentences that were presented dichotically and masked by fluctuating noise across a range of signal-to-noise ratios. In line with previous studies, the performance decreases when processing two target sentences instead of one. Additionally, dividing attention to process two sentences caused larger pupil dilation and later peak pupil latency than processing only one. This suggests an effect of attention on cognitive processing load (pupil dilation) during speech processing in noise.
Highlights
Talking to friends in a bar can be an effortful task
For a direct comparison between performance and pupil response in the dual-sentence condition, we computed the number of correctly reported words across both sentences, divided by the total number of words presented in these sentences
Mean pupil dilation was affected by signal to noise ratio (SNR), which is in line with previously reported effects of SNR on the pupil response (Zekveld et al, 2010) and might reflect changes in working memory load (Lunner and Sundewall-Thorén, 2007; Rönnberg et al, 2013)
Summary
Talking to friends in a bar can be an effortful task. There is music, there are often conversations going on in the background, and when some friends are in a heated discussion they might all start talking at the same time. Recent studies show that working memory capacity is related to speech perception (Desjardins and Doherty, 2013; Ng et al, 2013; e.g., Rudner et al, 2011) and cognitive load (Desjardins and Doherty, 2013; Koelewijn et al, 2012b; e.g., Picou and Ricketts, 2011). Despite these studies showing the effect perceptual processes and working memory capacity have on load during speech perception, it is not yet known how divided attention affects cognitive processing load when listening to speech in noise
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