An approach to the study of attentional components in auditory tasks

Some investigators have proposed a number of strategies or components of attention based on the analysis of the demands or requirements of certain laboratory tasks. The present investigation approached the analysis of auditory and visual attention from a different perspective. Volunteers (14 F, 27 M) from the health professions were given two widely-used auditory attentional tasks (remembering taped word lists, and shadowing, in monaural, binaural, and dichotic modes) and three visual tests (Stroop color-word tests, embedded figures, and anagrams) that appear to tap important aspects of attentional functioning; 18 indices of aspects of performance were taken from or derived from scores on these tests. Strong, significant r's emerged for a number of paired variables, suggesting that performance in these tasks share common elements. A principal factor analysis performed on the correlation matrix yielded a remarkably clean solution that uncovered four common sources for the variation observed in performance: Factor I identifies an aspect of attention tapped whenever distractions must be overcome; II is involved in continuously tracking or monitoring semantic aspects of connected material; III is an "executive" function that maintains or controls other aspects of attention; IV can be labeled breadth of attention, dealing with opposite aspects of the same underlying mechanism. These appear to be attentional components that underlie performance even in tasks that impose dissimilar demands or that have been interpreted as engaging different aspects of the attentional system. The factor analysis also provided some tentative answers for questions related to the comparability of different auditory tasks and of different aspects of performance for the same task.