As reliance on digital communication grows, so does the importance of communicating effectively with text. Yet when communicating with text, benefits from other channels, such as hand gesture, are diminished. Hand gestures support comprehension and disambiguate characteristics of the spoken message by providing information in a visual channel supporting speech.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAtten Percept Psychophys
October 2019
Viewing co-speech hand gestures with spoken phrases enhances memory for phrases, as compared to when the phrases are presented without gesture. Prior work investigating the mechanism underlying the effect of gesture on memory has implicated engagement of the motor system; when the hands are engaged in an unrelated motor task when viewing gesture, the beneficial effect of gesture is absent. However, one alternative interpretation of these findings is that the beneficial effect of gesture disappears due to mismatched contexts at encoding and retrieval: The hands are engaged during either encoding or retrieval, but not during both stages.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDual-task costs are often significantly reduced or eliminated when both tasks use compatible stimulus-response (S-R) pairs. Either by design or unintentionally, S-R pairs used in dual-task experiments that produce small dual-task costs typically have two properties that may reduce dual-task interference. One property is that they are easy to keep separate; specifically, one task is often visual-spatial and contains little verbal information and the other task is primarily auditory-verbal and has no significant spatial component.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychon Bull Rev
October 2015
Dual-task costs can be greatly reduced or even eliminated when both tasks use highly-compatible S-R associations. According to Greenwald (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 30, 632-636, 2003), this occurs because the appropriate response can be accessed without engaging performance-limiting response selection processes, a proposal consistent with the embodied cognition framework in that it suggests that stimuli can automatically activate motor codes (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImplicit learning in the serial reaction time (SRT) task is sometimes disrupted by the presence of a secondary distractor task (e.g., Schumacher & Schwarb Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 138:270-290, 2009) and at other times is not (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform
April 2013
Why are dual-task costs reduced with ideomotor (IM) compatible tasks (Greenwald & Shulman, 1973; Lien, Proctor & Allen, 2002)? In the present experiments, we first examine three different measures of single-task performance (pure single-task blocks, mixed blocks, and long stimulus onset asynchrony [SOA] trials in dual-task blocks) and two measures of dual-task performance (simultaneous stimulus presentation blocks and simultaneous stimulus presentation trials in blocks with mixed SOAs), and show that these different measures produce different estimates of the cost. Next we examine whether the near elimination of costs can be explained by assuming that one or both of the tasks bypasses capacity-limited central operations. The results indicate that both tasks must be IM-compatible to nearly eliminate the dual-task costs, suggesting that the relationship between the tasks plays a critical role in overlapping performance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudies investigating the effect of emotional expression on spatial orienting to a gazed-at location have produced mixed results. The present study investigated the role of affective context in the integration of emotion processing and gaze-triggered orienting. In three experiments, a face gazed nonpredictively to the left or right, and then its expression became fearful or happy.
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