Attentional Capture of Objects Referred to By the Spoken Language

Attentional Capture of Objects Referred to By the Spoken Language- an article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol. 37, No. 4, pg 1122-1133.

Chapter 9 in our book is titled “How Do We Sense, Perceive, and See the World?” Visual processing is the major function of the occipital lobe and also is carried out in many other parts of the brain. Researchers in the article I read questioned “can task-irrelevant linguistic information influence visual attention?” How much, basically, does hearing a spoken word (whether it is relevant to the task at hand or whether it is not) affect the speed at which one’s eyes respond to a visual stimulus?

Three separate experiments were performed in this study. Participants were 18 students with normal hearing and visual capabilities at the University of Rochester. In each of these three experiments, participants were required to process basic visual properties of objects. In experiments one and two the participants had to respond to a color change. In experiment three, the participants had to respond to the onset of motion in an object. I will now go into a bit of detail on each experiment and discuss what the experiments revealed about attentional capture of objects referred to by spoken language.

In experiment one, participants were told to “make an eye movement in response to the color change, not in response to the word being spoken”. The participants were presented with a visual display that had a central fixation cross with two objects on either side of it. After a short delay, a spoken word was presented that either referred to the target object (target object meaning the object that will light up—this is the congruent condition) or referred to the object that would not light up (distracter object—this is the incongruent condition). The target object would turn green. Based on previous research that showed that before the execution of an eye movement, attention is covertly shifted to the area of interest, researchers expected that if an object referred to by spoken word captures attention, the participants’ visual attention would shift toward that object even if this could not be overtly observed. Therefore, when the spoken word referred to the distracter object, researchers expected a longer latency between moving the eye towards the correct object that lit up. The eyes would need to reorient from shifting toward the incorrect object that was referred to linguistically.

The eye tracking system the researchers used recorded the time in milliseconds the eye took to move to the correct target. Latencies were, as expected, longer when the object the spoken word referred to was not the target object. This was a statistically significant effect (p < .0005). Spoken words do affect visual attention.

The second experiment was mostly identical to the first. However, there were four objects on the screen in this experiment. The spoken word referred to one object on the screen half the time, and an object not on the screen the other half of the time. Latencies were 20 milliseconds slower when the object referred to by spoken word did not exist on the screen, p < .0005.

In the third experiment, there were again two objects present on each display. This time, the spoken word referred to the target object (congruent condition), the distracter object (incongruent condition), or to an object not on the screen (control). Responses were the quickest in the congruent condition (707 milliseconds), intermediate in the control condition (738 milliseconds), and slowest in the incongruent condition (817 milliseconds). Once again, this was a statistically significant effect and the results were in line with results in the first two experiments.

            This research strongly suggests that visual attention is influenced by linguistic processing in the brain.