Effects of Task-Irrelevant Talker Identity and Continuity on Spatial Selective Attention Under Interruption.
Wusheng Liang, Abigail L Noyce, Christopher A Brown and 1 others
PMID 42283438WHAT IT FOUND
Healthy adults recalled competing syllables better when the two streams came from different talkers than from the same talker.
A sudden interrupting sound still hurt recall, but less so with different talkers, and the disruption lasted longer when the talker stayed the same.
Key findings
01When the target and distractor streams were spoken by different talkers, listeners recalled more target syllables correctly than when both streams used the same talker.
02The interrupting sound disrupted recall more when the two streams used the same talker than when they used different talkers. With the same talker, the disruption still affected the fourth and fifth syllables; with different talkers, only the syllable right after the interruption was affected.
03When the talker changed randomly from syllable to syllable, recall was worse than when the same talker was used throughout, and performance was worse when the talker changed between adjacent syllables than when it stayed the same.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The participants were healthy adults with self-reported normal hearing, so the study does not show what happens in people with hearing loss, auditory processing difficulties or communication conditions. Hearing was not measured, and the experiments were run online, so the researchers could not control the listening level. The two experiments used different participants and different constraints on whether syllables could repeat, which the authors say introduced confounds and makes direct comparisons between experiments difficult. Several explanations for the unexpected first-syllable result and for differences between experiments are post hoc; the experiments were not designed to test them. Some syllable-level comparisons had unbalanced trial counts, so the authors could not cleanly conclude that interruption effects differed across those subdivisions.
Declared interests
Funded by the Office of Naval Research (grant N00014-23-1-2065) and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (grant R01 DC019126). The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that changing talker voice will help patients with hearing, attention or communication difficulties. The participants were healthy adults with self-reported normal hearing, no clinical intervention was given, and the task was an online syllable recall experiment.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →