Dual Attention to Dynamically Structured Naturalistic Events 1

Abstract

Videotapes of two naturalistic events, a basketball-like game and a vocalizing human face, were presented in a dual-task situation, with subjects responding to target events in individual episodes. The fact that the stimulus episodes consisted of natural motions permitted subjects to base their attention on the partially determinate structure that characterizes such motions. Simultaneous visual presentations were in full transparent overlap; the auditory presentations were overlapped spatially. Performance on the dual task improved significantly in all experimental conditions over two days of practice. Performance approached control-group ceiling levels for events available to different modalities (hearing and sight). When information was available only in a single modality, performance was lower over-all, but practice effects were still significant. The results are discussed in the context of a cognitive skills approach to attention.