End-of-experiment content quizzes effectively enforce directed attention in audiovisual speech tasks

Evidence

2.3 Procedure The study included two consecutive experiments, Exp. A. followed by Exp. B (always in this order). In Exp. A, the participants were involved in a monitoring paradigm in which they were asked to constantly look at the screen and monitor for possible “ba” or “da” targets by pressing an appropriate key, as in Nahorna et al. ( 2012 , 2015 ). In Exp. B the monitoring “ba” vs. “da” task remained the same (with a different order of the 120 stimuli in the film), but in addition, specific instructions were given to participants, either to put more attention to syllables (“Attention syllables”) or to put more attention to sentences (“Attention sentences”). The order of the “Attention syllables” and “Attention sentences” conditions was counterbalanced between the participants. To increase the efficiency of the attentional demand, participants were informed that they would be questioned on the content of either the “syllables” or the “sentences” material at the end of the experiment. … Response time was computed in reference to the acoustic onset of the burst of the “b” in the target syllable, discarding values higher than 1200 ms or lower than 200 ms. “ba” and “da” responses were taken into account only when they occurred within this time window (200–1200 ms) and in case of two different responses inside the time window, both responses were also discarded. Finally, for each participant and each condition of context and target (and attention in Exp. B), a global score of “ba” responses was calculated as the percentage of “ba” responses divided by the sum of “ba” and “da” responses to the target, and a mean response time was calculated as the average of response times for all the responses to the target. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 5158

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the attentional-manipulation technique: instructing attention toward syllables vs. sentences, backed by a threatened content quiz, and how responses are gated to a 200-1200ms window.