Distribution Of Selective Attention Research Articles

An Eye-Tracking Study on Audiovisual Speech Perception Strategies Adopted by Normal-Hearing and Deaf Adults Under Different Language Familiarities.

Purpose The primary purpose of this study was to explore the audiovisual speech perception strategies.80.23.47 adopted by normal-hearing and deaf people in processing familiar and unfamiliar languages. Our primary hypothesis was that they would adopt different perception strategies due to different sensory experiences at an early age, limitations of the physical device, and the developmental gap of language, and others. Method Thirty normal-hearing adults and 33 prelingually deaf adults participated in the study. They were asked to perform judgment and listening tasks while watching videos of a Uygur-Mandarin bilingual speaker in a familiar language (Standard Chinese) or an unfamiliar language (Modern Uygur) while their eye movements were recorded by eye-tracking technology. Results Task had a slight influence on the distribution of selective attention, whereas subject and language had significant influences. To be specific, the normal-hearing and the d10eaf participants mainly gazed at the speaker's eyes and mouth, respectively, in the experiment; moreover, while the normal-hearing participants had to stare longer at the speaker's mouth when they confronted with the unfamiliar language Modern Uygur, the deaf participant did not change their attention allocation pattern when perceiving the two languages. Conclusions Normal-hearing and deaf adults adopt different audiovisual speech perception strategies: Normal-hearing adults mainly look at the eyes, and deaf adults mainly look at the mouth. Additionally, language and task can also modulate the speech perception strategy.

Selective attention and perceptual learning of speech

Phonetic experience can change the perceptual distance between speech sounds, increasing both within-category similarity and between-category distinctiveness. Such warping of perceptual space is frequently characterized in terms of changes in selective attention: Listeners are assumed to attend more strongly to category-differentiating features while ignoring less relevant ones. However, the link between the distribution of selective attention and categorization-related differences in perceptual distance has not been empirically demonstrated. To explore this relationship, listeners were given 6 h of training to categorize sounds according to one of two acoustic features while ignoring the other. The features were voice onset time and onset f0, which are normally correlated and can both serve as a cue to consonant voicing. Before and after training, listener’s performance on a Garner selective attention task was compared with assessment of the perceptual distance between tokens. Results suggest that training can induce both warping of perceptual space and changes in the distribution of selective attention, but the two phenomena are not necessarily related. Results are consistent with a two-stage model of perceptual learning, involving both preattentive adjustment of acoustic cue weighting and higher-level changes in the distribution of selective attention between acoustic cues. [Work supported by NIH-NIDCD 1R03DC006811.]

Generative naming in aphasia during conditions of quiet and cafeteria noise distraction

Aphasia theory is evolving to include aspects of cognitive resource allocation including the performance of individuals during dual task paradigms as well as during interference, competition, and distraction (Erickson, Goldinger, & LaPointe, 1996; LaPointe & Erickson, 1991; McNeil, 1997; Murray, 1999). Signal extraction from competing stimuli has been shown to be influenced by such factors as arousal, motivation, effort, task demands, and nervous system integrity. Limited capacity cognitive systems require parsing and distribution of selective attention among the cascade of attended and unattended stimuli that surround communicators, but few studies of individuals with aphasia have considered or controlled efficiency of these stimulus variables during communication attempts.