Cognitive Research (May 2024)

Attention capture by own name decreases with speech compression

  • Simon Y. W. Li,
  • Alan L. F. Lee,
  • Jenny W. S. Chiu,
  • Robert G. Loeb,
  • Penelope M. Sanderson

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-024-00555-9
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 9, no. 1
pp. 1 – 16

Abstract

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Abstract Auditory stimuli that are relevant to a listener have the potential to capture focal attention even when unattended, the listener’s own name being a particularly effective stimulus. We report two experiments to test the attention-capturing potential of the listener’s own name in normal speech and time-compressed speech. In Experiment 1, 39 participants were tested with a visual word categorization task with uncompressed spoken names as background auditory distractors. Participants’ word categorization performance was slower when hearing their own name rather than other names, and in a final test, they were faster at detecting their own name than other names. Experiment 2 used the same task paradigm, but the auditory distractors were time-compressed names. Three compression levels were tested with 25 participants in each condition. Participants’ word categorization performance was again slower when hearing their own name than when hearing other names; the slowing was strongest with slight compression and weakest with intense compression. Personally relevant time-compressed speech has the potential to capture attention, but the degree of capture depends on the level of compression. Attention capture by time-compressed speech has practical significance and provides partial evidence for the duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction.

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