The face-to-face light detection paradigm

Abstract

We introduce a novel paradigm for studying the cognitive processes used by listeners within interactive settings. This paradigm places the talker and the listener in the same physical space, creating opportunities for investigations of attention and comprehension processes taking place during interactive discourse situations. An experiment was conducted to compare results from previous research using videotaped stimuli to those obtained within the live face-to-face task paradigm. A headworn apparatus is used to briefly display LEDs on the talker's face in four locations as the talker communicates with the participant. In addition to the primary task of comprehending speeches, participants make a secondary task light detection response. In the present experiment, the talker gave non-emotionally-expressive speeches that were used in past research with videotaped stimuli. Signal detection analysis was employed to determine which areas of the face received the greatest focus of attention. Results replicate previous findings using videotaped methods. Keywordsface-to-face interaction; attention; discourse comprehension Previous investigations of attention during language comprehension have utilized many different methodologies and have produced many interesting findings. For example, research going back to the 1960s using dichotic listening tasks has demonstrated a consistent right ear advantage (REA) in reporting words. That is, when stimuli are presented in the right ear, they are processed faster and more accurately than when stimuli are presented in the left ear. This effect is observed in experiments using auditory-alone (e.g., Broadbent & Gregory, 1965;Grimshaw, Kwasny, Covell, & Johnson, 2003;Hiscock, Inch, &Kinsbourne, 1999), and auditory-visual (Thompson, Garcia, &Malloy, 2007;Thompson & Guzman, 1999) stimuli. These results are interpreted as evidence of left hemisphere specialization for linguistic processing. When auditory speech understanding includes a greater emphasis on the interpretation of emotional prosody, however, dichotic listening tasks almost universally show a left ear advantage (LEA) for comprehension of emotional prosody (e.g.,

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“…The aim of our experiment was to test these possibilities. Two somewhat relevant previous studies reported an LVF performance decrement after or during exposure to emotional stimuli (Hartikainen, Ogawa, & Knight, 2000;Thompson, Malloy, Cone, & Hendrickson, 2009), but in both cases, such effects could have been due to eye movement biases, spatial attention shifts, or featural differences between emotional and nonemotional stimuli.…”

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