Material type and attention control in dichotic listening.
The present study investigated the effects of semantic and emotional content on laterality effects found in focused attention dichotic listening tasks. A total of 80 right-handed participants completed one of four conditions. They were presented either with dichotic pairs of consonant-vowel (CV) syllables (ba, da, ga, ka, pa, or ta) or words (bower, dower, power, or tower), pronounced in either a neutral tone or one of four emotional tones (happy, sad, angry, neutral). In all conditions, participants were instructed to circle the stimulus presented to the attended ear on each trial. The attended ear was randomised between blocks of trials for each participant. A significant condition by ear attended by ear of presentation interaction emerged. The typical right ear advantage (REA) was found in the neutral conditions, regardless of ear attended. In contrast, the emotional conditions revealed an REA when participants focused on the right ear, whereas a left ear advantage was found when they focused on the left ear. These findings suggest that the emotional component resulted in a shift in ear advantage coinciding with instructions possibly because of the influence of this component on attention and task difficulty. The role of semantic processing in words versus syllables is also discussed.
Techentin
Cheryl
C
University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada. Cheryl.Techentin@unb.ca
Voyer
Daniel
D
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D001307:Auditory Perception; D004423:Ear / Q000502:physiology; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D007839:Functional Laterality; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D000091402:Prohibitins; D012660:Semantics