Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London
Things have gone quiet recently in the lab: Sandra is writing up her PhD thesis and most of our undergraduate students have gone home for the summer. But we are looking forward to welcoming back our finalists for the Psychology graduation ceremony on Tuesday. Congratulations everyone!
Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Our final year students have now finished their projects on real-world distractability and are turning their focus to revision. We will post details of the results in the summer. In the meantime, good luck everyone!
2012 was an exciting year for the lab and we are now looking forward to 2013. Our projects on real-world distractability are heading into the analysis phase and our first EEG experiment is well under-way. We will post the results as soon as we can.
Two groups of final year students are currently setting up their research projects in the lab. Both will be looking at the relationship between people’s real-world distractability and their performance on lab-based auditory attention tasks. Lucie, Lizzie, Ben and Lauren are using an auditory flanker task (developed by Sandra as part of her PhD work). Kayleigh, Sarunas and Kathy are using an auditory attentional capture task.
Welcome to the lab everyone and good luck with your projects!
Congratulations to Sandra on her recent paper: ‘The role of perceptual load in action affordance by ignored objects’. This work was carried out while Sandra was at Goldsmiths with José van Velzen and Jan de Fockert.
Our test of auditory awareness features five actors who have so far remained anonymous. They were all members of our department at the time and they patiently put up with our demanding yet incompetent direction for several hours, to achieve the 69 second clip that we used in the final experiment. It is high time we acknowledged their contributions!
‘The women’s conversation’: Jac Billington and Samantha McCormick
‘The men’s conversation’: Charles Hounsell and Damian Poulter
‘The gorilla’: David Kelly
We are very excited about the continuing interest in our recent article. This work has been featured on NBC’s The Body Odd and in the latest issue of the BPS research digest. It is also being discussed on a range of other interesting blogs. (Polly has recently commented on one of these, to clarify the relationship between our work and the dichotic listening research of the 1950s and 60s).
This is a slightly edited version of the experiment we ran for our forthcoming article (Dalton & Fraenkel, 2012). In the last few days it’s been reported on by various media outlets, including the BBC, the Huffington Post, and the Wall Street Journal.
Please put on some headphones and try it for yourself.
As always, we’d love to hear your comments!
Our article about people’s failure to notice an auditory ‘gorilla man’ when paying attention to something else will shortly be published in Cognition. You can listen to a demo here. Remember to use headphones for the full 3D effect! More details coming soon.
Our recent article investigated the impact of satnavs on driver performance.
We found that the spoken directions are widely used by drivers and are remembered more effectively than map-based directions. In addition, participants in our study were able to follow simple spoken instructions without any adverse impact on the simulated driving task. These findings indicate that auditory presentation can be a very effective way of delivering route guidance to drivers.
However, when the spoken instructions became more complex, we did see reductions in driving performance. It is therefore important to keep the spoken directions as simple and straightforward as possible.
This research has been covered by a range of media outlets including the BBC, Guardian and Telegraph. As ever, we would welcome your feedback, so please do contact us if you have questions or comments.