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Paying Attention to Speech: The Role of Cognitive Capacity and Acquired Experience

Managing attention in multi-speaker environments is a challenging feat that is critical for human performance. However, why some people are better than others in allocating attention appropriately, remains highly unknown. Here we investigated the contribution of two factors – Cognitive Capacity and Acquired Experience – to performance on two different types of Attention task: Selective Attention to one speaker and Distributed Attention among multiple concurrent speakers. We compared performance across three groups: Individuals with low (n=20) and high cognitive capacity (n=26), and Aircraft Pilots (n=25), who have gained extensive experience on both Selective and Distributed attention to speech through their training and profession. Results indicate that both types of Attention benefit from higher Cognitive Capacity, suggesting reliance on common capacity-limited resources. However, only Selective Attention was further improved in the Pilots, pointing to its flexible and trainable nature, whereas Distributed Attention seems to suffer from more fixed and hard-wired processing-bottlenecks.