Kunar Melina A, Carter Randall, Cohen Michael, Horowitz Todd S
University of Warwick, Coventry, England.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2008 Dec;15(6):1135-40. doi: 10.3758/PBR.15.6.1135.
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.
最近的研究表明，进行电话交谈会干扰人的驾驶能力。我们探讨了这种影响是否可归因于视觉注意力受损。在实验1中，参与者在进行多目标跟踪（MOT，一项需要持续视觉注意力的任务）时进行电话交谈或听一段叙述。我们发现，相对于单任务MOT表现，在电话交谈条件下MOT受到了干扰，但听一段叙述则没有影响。在实验2中，我们探究了交谈的哪个部分可能会干扰MOT表现。我们重复了实验1中的交谈和单任务条件，并增加了两个条件，即参与者通过电话听到一系列单词。在跟读条件下，参与者只需重复序列中的每个单词。在生成条件下，参与者被要求根据序列中的每个单词生成一个新单词。单词生成干扰了MOT表现，但跟读没有。数据表明，电话交谈在中枢阶段（即生成言语刺激的行为）而非外周阶段（如听或说）干扰注意力。
