Bilingualism and Divided Attention study

Thank you for participating in this study!

Below is some information to let you know what the study was about and what we found.

The research topic: Divided attention

Have you ever wondered how, while driving, an individual can efficiently track the many other cars on the road while avoiding being distracted by irrelevant information such as sign posts by the side of the road? The answer is that we use a selective process known as attention. Attention can be described like a spotlight in a dark theatre – if you pay attention to something, it's like shining a spotlight on it. The object in the spotlight will be clear, bright, and easy to see and you will be able to respond to it very easily. Anything that is not inside the spotlight will be much dimmer and harder to see and you won't respond to it quickly or well. Given this, it is very important for us to understand how our attention operates and how where we pay attention changes over time.

Research has shown that it is possible for us take our attentional spotlight and split it into two separate spotlights, each of which can be directed independently to different objects or locations (see Figure 1 below). In the research you took part in, we are examining what factors influence the likelihood that the attentional spotlight will be split and how quickly the spotlight can be split.

The research question: Does bilingualism affect the rate of splitting attention?

It is well established that people who are bilingual have cognitive systems that function in a different way than people who are monolingual (e.g., Bialystok, 1992; Mishra et al., 2012). You've probably heard about this in the context of people who are bilingual (or who are studying a foreign language, even if they're not fluent) having a reduced risk of Alzheimer's when they age (e.g., Woumans et al., 2015). In our research we are interested in whether being bilingual affects some of the fundamental ways in which the attentional spotlight functions. In particular, we are interested in whether there is a difference in the likelihood that the spotlight can be split and the speed at which it can be split.

How did we test the research question?

We used a research methodology adapted from previous research (Jefferies & Witt, 2019), which presented rapidly-displayed sequences of letters (targets) and digits (distractors). If the targets were processed accurately (our dependent variable was accuracy), this means the location at which they appeared was attended. By systematically manipulating the location of the targets (our first independent variable), we could track the distribution of attention and determine whether it was unitary or divided. By systematically changing when the targets were displayed (our second independent variable), we could also track how the distribution of attention changed over time.

What did we find?

It's a bit of a mixed story (as is so often the case with psychology research!). The data that we have so far suggests that people who are bilingual begin splitting their attentional spotlight earlier than people who are monolingual. Once the splitting process begins, though, it happens at about the same rate in bilingual and monolingual individuals. Bilingual individuals seem to commence splitting the attentional focus about 50 milliseconds (thousandths of a second) sooner than monolingual individuals. That doesn’t sound like much, but if you are driving a vehicle travelling 100 km/hour that means you would break about 1.4 meters sooner. As you can imagine, in an emergency driving situation, this could mean the difference between a collision or not!

What are the next steps?

Before we can be confident in our findings, we need to eliminate some alternate explanations of the results and control for some confounding variables. We also have future research questions in mind. For example, all of our participants are fully bilingual and we don't yet know whether this same pattern of beginning to split attention sooner would happen for individuals who are still learning another language, but are not yet fluent. What do you think? How fluent do you have to be to see these changes in visual attention?

References

Bialystok, E. (1992). Selective attention in cognitive processing: The bilingual edge. In Advances in psychology(Vol. 83, pp. 501-513). North-Holland.

Jefferies, L. N., & Witt, J. B. (2019). First unitary, then divided: the temporal dynamics of dividing attention. Psychological research, 83, 1426-1443. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-018-1018-3

Mishra, R. K., Hilchey, M. D., Singh, N., & Klein, R. M. (2012). On the time course of exogenous cueing effects in bilinguals: higher proficiency in a second language is associated with more rapid endogenous disengagement. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 65, 1502-1510.

Woumans, E. V. Y., Santens, P., Sieben, A., Versijpt, J. A. N., Stevens, M., & Duyck, W. (2015). Bilingualism delays clinical manifestation of Alzheimer's disease. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 18(3), 568-574.

If you have questions about this research, please contact L.Jefferies@griffith.edu.au

Curious to learn more about attention or visual cognition? Here are some books that you might enjoy:

• Chabris, C. F., & Simons, D. J. (2010). The invisible gorilla: And other ways our intuitions deceive us. Harmony.

• Doidge, N. (2007). The brain that changes itself: Stories of personal triumph from the frontiers of brain science. Penguin. (Available as an e-book in the City of Gold Coast public library via Overdrive)

• Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan. (Available as an e-book in the City of Gold Coast public library via Overdrive)

• Gladwell, M. (2006). Blink: The power of thinking without thinking. (Available as an e-book in the City of Gold Coast public library via Overdrive)