Having a phone conversation delays but does not disrupt cognitive mechanisms.

Abstract

Public Significance StatementThis study suggests that engaging in a phone conversation does not prevent people from performing a cognitive task. People remain able to learn spatial layouts and filter out irrelevant information when conversing and performing a visual search task. However, having a conversation leads to a consistent delay in their responses. This delay has consequences for applied tasks where the ability to respond quickly is important (e.g. driving). AbstractPrevious research has shown that talking on a mobile phone leads to impairments in a number of cognitive tasks. However, it is not yet known whether the act of conversation disrupts the underlying cognitive mechanisms (the Cognitive Disruption hypothesis) or leads to a delay in response due to a limit on central cognitive resources (the Cognitive Delay hypothesis). We investigated this here using two cognitive search tasks that investigate spatial learning and time-based selection: Contextual Cueing and Visual Marking. In Contextual Cueing, responses to repeated displays are faster than those to novel displays. In Visual Marking, participants prioritise attention to new information and deprioritise old, unimportant information (the 'Preview Benefit'). Experiments 1 to 3 investigated whether Contextual Cueing occurred while people were engaged in a phone conversation, whereas Experiments 4 to 6 investigated whether a Preview Benefit occurred, again while people were engaged in conversation. The results showed that having a conversation did not interfere with the mechanisms underlying spatial learning or time-based selection. However, in all experiments there was a significant increase in response times. The results are consistent with a Cognitive Delay account explaining the dual-task cost of having a phone conversation on concurrent cognitive tasks.

Telephone conversations affect the executive but not the alerting or orienting network.

“…Participants were slower to respond in the conversation condition compared to the no conversation condition. This is consistent with the cognitive delay account proposed by Gunnell et al (2020).…”

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Previous work has shown that talking on a mobile phone leads to an impairment of visual attention. Gunnell et al (2020) investigated the locus of these dual-task impairments and found that although phone conversations led to cognitive delays in response times, other mechanisms underlying particular selective attention tasks were unaffected. Here, we investigated which attentional networks, if any, were impaired by having a phone conversation.

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“…In their research, Bergen et al (2013) found evidence for both domain-general interference in a participants' braking RTs and domain-specific interference in a distance following task (in which participants were asked to maintain a specific distance from a lead vehicle). Gunnell et al (2020) investigated whether conversational competition for attentional resources would lead to interference of specific attentional mechanisms, or whether it would just lead to a delay in our ability to respond. They investigated this using the mechanisms of contextual cueing (CC) and visual marking (VM).…”

Contextual cueing in preview search

“…Although mechanistically different, the preview benefit and contextual cueing also shared similarities. For example, a distracting concurrent tasktalking on the cell phone increased overall response time in both contextual cueing and preview search tasks (Gunnell et al, 2019). This similarity presents the possibility that the two mechanisms may interact to influence visual selection (Hodsoll & Humphreys, 2005).…”

“…Second, because both preview search and contextual cueing depend, in part, on attentional resources (Gunnell et al, 2019;Jiang & Chun, 2001;Watson & Humphreys, 1997), context learning of set 2 may be reduced when resources are needed to inhibit set 1. Specifically, "marking" the locations of set 1 items requires visual short-term memory (Jiang & Wang, 2004).…”