Citation

Payne DG, Peters LJ, Birkmire DP, Bonto MA, Anastasi JS, Wenger MJ. Hum. Factors 1994; 36(3): 441-475.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, State University of New York at Binghamton 13902-6000.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1994, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

7989051

Abstract

Four experiments were performed to determine if changes in the level of speech intelligibility in an auditory task have an impact on performance in concurrent visual tasks. The auditory task used in each experiment was a memory search task in which subjects memorized a set of words and then decided whether auditorily presented probe items were members of the memorized set. The visual tasks used were an unstable tracking task, a spatial decision-making task, a mathematical reasoning task, and a probability monitoring task. Results showed that performance on the unstable tracking and probability monitoring tasks was unaffected by the level of speech intelligibility on the auditory task, whereas accuracy in the spatial decision-making and mathematical processing tasks was significantly worse at low speech intelligibility levels. The findings are interpreted within the framework of multiple resource theory.