Examining the Role of Eye Movements During Conversational Listening in Noise.

Speech comprehension is often thought of as an entirely auditory process, but both normal hearing and hearing-impaired individuals sometimes use visual attention to disambiguate speech, particularly when it is difficult to hear. Many studies have investigated how visual attention (or the lack thereof) impacts the perception of simple speech sounds such as isolated consonants, but there is a gap in the literature concerning visual attention during natural speech comprehension. This issue needs to be addressed, as individuals process sounds and words in everyday speech differently than when they are separated into individual elements with no competing sound sources or noise. Moreover, further research is needed to explore patterns of eye movements during speech comprehension - especially in the presence of noise - as such an investigation would allow us to better understand how people strategically use visual information while processing speech. To this end, we conducted an experiment to track eye-gaze behavior during a series of listening tasks as a function of the number of speakers, background noise intensity, and the presence or absence of simulated hearing impairment. Our specific aims were to discover how individuals might adapt their oculomotor behavior to compensate for the difficulty of the listening scenario, such as when listening in noisy environments or experiencing simulated hearing loss. Speech comprehension difficulty was manipulated by simulating hearing loss and varying background noise intensity. Results showed that eye movements were affected by the number of speakers, simulated hearing impairment, and the presence of noise. Further, findings showed that differing levels of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) led to changes in eye-gaze behavior. Most notably, we found that the addition of visual information (i.e. videos vs. auditory information only) led to enhanced speech comprehension - highlighting the strategic usage of visual information during this process.

On the ambiguity regarding the relationship between sequential congruency effects, bilingual advantages in cognitive control, and the disengagement of attention.

Grundy, Bialystok, and colleagues have reported that at short response-stimulus intervals bilinguals have smaller sequential congruency effects in flanker tasks compared to monolinguals. They interpret these differences to mean that bilinguals are more efficient at disengaging attentional control. Ten empirical studies are presented that show no differences between bilinguals and monolinguals under conditions that produced robust sequential congruency effects. These null results are discussed with respect to the rate at which sequential congruency effects dissipate and the fact these effects are not adaptive in the sense of improving overall performance. Arguments made by Goldsmith and Morton [1] that smaller sequential congruency effects should not be interpreted as "advantages" are extended. Evidence is also presented that neither simple congruency effects, nor sequential congruency effects, correlate across tasks. This lack of convergent validity is inconsistent with the hypothesis that either provides a measure of domain-general control that could underlie an advantage accrued through experience in switching languages. Results from other tasks purporting to show bilingual advantages in the disengagement of attention are also reviewed. We conclude that sequential congruency effects in nonverbal interference tasks and differences in the rate of disengaging attention are unlikely to contribute to our understanding of bilingual language control and that future research might productively examine differences in proactive rather than reactive control.

The sampling precision of research in five major areas of psychology.

After obtaining a sample of published, peer-reviewed articles from journals with high and low impact factors in social, cognitive, neuro-, developmental, and clinical psychology, we used a priori equations recently derived by Trafimow (Educational and Psychological Measurement, 77, 831-854, 2017; Trafimow & MacDonald in Educational and Psychological Measurement, 77, 204-219, 2017) to compute the articles' median levels of precision. Our findings indicate that developmental research performs best with respect to precision, whereas cognitive research performs the worst; however, none of the psychology subfields excelled. In addition, we found important differences in precision between journals in the upper versus lower echelons with respect to impact factors in cognitive, neuro-, and clinical psychology, whereas the difference was dramatically attenuated for social and developmental psychology. Implications are discussed.