Department of Psychology, University of South Carolina, 1512 Pendelton Street, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA.
Institute for Mind and Brain, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA.
Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2022 Feb 4;7(1):12. doi: 10.1186/s41235-022-00357-x.
We report results from a driving simulator paradigm we developed to test the fine temporal effects of verbal tasks on simultaneous tracking performance. A total of 74 undergraduate students participated in two experiments in which they controlled a cursor using the steering wheel to track a moving target and where the dependent measure was overall deviation from target. Experiment 1 tested tracking performance during slow and fast target speeds under conditions involving either no verbal input or output, passive listening to spoken prompts via headphones, or responding to spoken prompts. Experiment 2 was similar except that participants read written prompts overlain on the simulator screen instead of listening to spoken prompts. Performance in both experiments was worse during fast speeds and worst overall during responding conditions. Most significantly, fine scale time-course analysis revealed deteriorating tracking performance as participants prepared and began speaking and steadily improving performance while speaking. Additionally, post-block survey data revealed that conversation recall was best in responding conditions, and perceived difficulty increased with task complexity. Our study is the first to track temporal changes in interference at high resolution during the first hundreds of milliseconds of verbal production and comprehension. Our results are consistent with load-based theories of multitasking performance and show that language production, and, to a lesser extent, language comprehension tap resources also used for tracking. More generally, our paradigm provides a useful tool for measuring dynamical changes in tracking performance during verbal tasks due to the rapidly changing resource requirements of language production and comprehension.
我们报告了一个驾驶模拟器范式的结果，该范式旨在测试口头任务对同时跟踪性能的精细时间效应。共有 74 名本科生参与了两个实验，他们使用方向盘控制光标跟踪移动目标，而依赖指标是目标的总体偏差。实验 1 在慢和快目标速度下测试了在无口头输入或输出、通过耳机被动听口头提示或响应口头提示的条件下的跟踪性能。实验 2 类似，只是参与者阅读叠加在模拟器屏幕上的书面提示，而不是听口头提示。在两种实验条件下，速度较快时性能较差，响应条件下总体性能最差。最显著的是，精细的时间过程分析显示，随着参与者准备和开始说话，跟踪性能会恶化，而在说话过程中性能会稳步提高。此外，在块后调查数据中，参与者在响应条件下的对话回忆最好，而感知难度随着任务复杂性的增加而增加。我们的研究首次在言语产生和理解的最初几百毫秒内以高分辨率跟踪干扰的时间变化。我们的结果与基于负载的多任务处理性能理论一致，表明语言产生，以及在较小程度上，语言理解，需要占用也用于跟踪的资源。更一般地说，由于语言产生和理解的资源需求迅速变化，我们的范式为测量言语任务期间跟踪性能的动态变化提供了一个有用的工具。
