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Talking and driving: applications of crossmodal action reveal a special role for spatial language

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Abstract

Talking reduces attention resulting in real-world crash risks to drivers that talk on a phone and drive. Driving is a behavior that is very demanding on spatial attention, suggesting potentially large interference by spatial codes in language. The current study investigated how different types of verbal codes influence visual attention during dual-task performance. In two experiments, participants performed a spatial or non-spatial verbal task while simultaneously performing a visual attention task. The results showed a larger decrement to visual attention performance when participants were concurrently engaged in a spatial verbal task. The results of the second experiment isolated this effect to the right cerebral hemisphere, consistent with a role for shared right parietal resources. These results are consistent with the idea that processing codes are an important component of coordinating talking and driving but generally inconsistent with a broad class of bottleneck approaches that describes dual-task decrements but treats component tasks as cognitively equivalent.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by a State Farm Companies Doctoral Dissertation Award to Jeff Dressel and by funding from the KU Transportation Research Institute to the first author. We thank Daniel Voyer for his help with the dichotic presentation version of the work.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, 1415 Jayhawk Blvd, Lawrence, KS, 66045, USA

    Paul Atchley & David Marshall

  2. CSSI, Inc, Washington, USA

    Jeff Dressel

  3. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Todd C. Jones & Rebecca A. Burson

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  1. Paul Atchley
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  2. Jeff Dressel
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Correspondence to Paul Atchley.

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Atchley, P., Dressel, J., Jones, T.C. et al. Talking and driving: applications of crossmodal action reveal a special role for spatial language. Psychological Research 75, 525–534 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-011-0342-7

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