Effects of speech intelligibility level on concurrent visual task performance

Four experiments were performed to determine if changes in the level of speech intelligibility in an auditory task have an impact on performance in concurrent visual tasks. The auditory task used in each experiment was a memory search task in which subjects memorized a set of words and then decided...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inHuman factors Vol. 36; no. 3; p. 441
Main Authors Payne, D G, Peters, L J, Birkmire, D P, Bonto, M A, Anastasi, J S, Wenger, M J
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States 01.09.1994
Subjects
Adult
Attention
Female
Humans
Male
Mental Recall
Problem Solving
Psychomotor Performance
Speech Intelligibility
Speech Perception
Verbal Learning
Visual Perception
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Summary:Four experiments were performed to determine if changes in the level of speech intelligibility in an auditory task have an impact on performance in concurrent visual tasks. The auditory task used in each experiment was a memory search task in which subjects memorized a set of words and then decided whether auditorily presented probe items were members of the memorized set. The visual tasks used were an unstable tracking task, a spatial decision-making task, a mathematical reasoning task, and a probability monitoring task. Results showed that performance on the unstable tracking and probability monitoring tasks was unaffected by the level of speech intelligibility on the auditory task, whereas accuracy in the spatial decision-making and mathematical processing tasks was significantly worse at low speech intelligibility levels. The findings are interpreted within the framework of multiple resource theory.
ISSN:0018-7208
DOI:10.1177/001872089403600304