Attending to Visual or Auditory Verbal Information While Performing Other Concurrent Tasks

Abstract

Investigation of the effect that a word recognition task has on concurrent nonverbal tasks showed (a) auditory verbal messages affected visual tracking performance but not the detection of brief light flashes in the visual periphery, (b) greater impairment, both of tracking and light detections, when verbal messages were visual rather than auditory. With a kinaesthetic tracking task, errors increased significantly during auditory messages but were even greater during visual messages. There was no interaction between the modality of tracking error feedback (auditory or visual) and the modality of the verbal message. Nor was the decrement from visual messages reduced by changing the presentation format. It is suggested that different temporal characteristics of visual and auditory information affect the attentional demands of verbal messages.