Conversation does not just consist of a sequence of listening and speaking phases. Instead, talkers must simultaneously conduct speech understanding, planning, and prediction to facilitate fluid turn-taking. This study aims to investigate this divided attention problem by evaluating differences in conversational pupillary responses between talkers actively participating in a conversation, and passive third-party observers of the conversation. To encourage engagement of the passive participants, task-based conversations are utilized such that the passive listener can follow along with the task. These task-based conversations were held both in the presence and absence of background noise. Each participant interacted in eight conversations (active) and listened to four pre-recorded conversations (passive). Stronger pupil dilation in response to specific landmarks in conversation (i.e., turn-starts and -ends) was observed in the active versus passive conditions. This finding suggests that divided attention necessitated by interactive conversation modulates the availability of cognitive resources for listening during conversation. This observation provides a potential mechanism for extending our understanding of the effects of hearing loss from listening ability to communicative ability.
Masters et al. (Wed,) studied this question.
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