Audio-visual object search is changed by bilingual experience

Atten Percept Psychophys (2015) 77:2684–2693 DOI 10.3758/s13414-015-0973-7 Audio-visual object search is changed by bilingual experience Sarah Chabal 1 & Scott R. Schroeder 1 & Viorica Marian 1 Published online: 14 August 2015 # The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2015 Abstract The current study examined the impact of language experience on the ability to efficiently search for objects in the face of distractions. Monolingual and bilingual participants completed an ecologically-valid, object-finding task that contained conflicting, consistent, or neutral auditory cues. Bilinguals were faster than monolinguals at locating the target item, and eye movements revealed that this speed advantage was driven by bilinguals’ ability to overcome interference from visual distractors and focus their attention on the relevant object. Bilinguals fixated the target object more often than did their monolingual peers, who, in contrast, attended more to a distracting image. Moreover, bilinguals’, but not monolinguals’, object-finding ability was positively associated with their executive control ability. We conclude that bilinguals’ executive control advantages extend to real-world visual processing and object finding within a multi-modal environment. Keywords Attention and executive control . Eye movements and visual attention . Visual search As we navigate the world, we receive information through multiple modalities, including inputs to both our auditory and visual systems. These multiple inputs compete for our attention, and we must selectively focus on the inputs that are most useful to the task at hand. Sometimes, two different sensory inputs provide complementary cues that are both beneficial to the task, and integrating across modalities can improve performance. For * Sarah Chabal 1 Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, 2240 North Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208-3570, USA example, imagine you are searching for your keys on a cluttered desk and you hear your keys clink together while opening a drawer. In this scenario, auditory and visual inputs are rapidly integrated to speed search (e.g., Chen & Spence, 2010; Iordanescu, Grabowecky, Franconeri, Theeuwes, & Suzuki, 2010; Iordanescu, Guzman-Martinez, Grabowecky, & Suzuki, 2008; Molholm, Ritter, Javitt, & Foxe, 2004). Often, however, two sensory modalities provide conflicting cues, of which only one is useful. For example, as you search for your keys you may hear papers shuffling on your desk or your dog barking in the background. In this case only visual input (the shape of your keys) provides relevant information, and incompatible crossmodal cues become detrimental (Tellinghuisen & Nowak, 2003). Because conflicting sensory inputs can negatively impact performance (Tellinghuisen & Nowak, 2003), efficient search requires that misleading auditory information be ignored – a task relying on executive control (Baddeley & Larsen, 2003; Elliott, 2002). As executive control is already needed to manage information from competing visual inputs (i.e., ignoring all distracting items in favor of the target object; Anderson, Vogel, & Awh, 2013; Bleckley, Durso, Crutchfield, Engle, & Khanna, 2003; Poole & Kane, 2009), conducting a visual search within an auditory context places increased demands on the cognitive control system. Given the high executive demands of multi-modal search, strong executive control abilities may be necessary for efficient target identification. Executive control is a malleable skill that can be improved through experience and practice (e.g., Bialystok, 2006; Green, Sugarman, Medford, Klobusicky, & Bavelier, 2012; Tang et al., 2007). For example, people who speak more than one language develop enhanced executive control relative to their monolingual peers. Because both of a bilingual’s languages are simultaneously activated when processing both auditory (e.g., Marian & Spivey, 2003a, 2003b; Spivey & Marian, Atten Percept Psychophys (2015) 77:2684–2693 1999) and visual (Chabal & Marian, 2015) inputs, bilinguals must suppress information from the unneeded language and attend only to relevant linguistic information. This practice results in enhanced executive function abilities (e.g., Bialystok, 2006, 2008; Costa, Hernández, & SebastiánGallés, 2008; Martin-Rhee & Bialystok, 2008; Prior & Macwhinney, 2009). Bilinguals often outperform their monolingual peers on tasks involving conflict monitoring (e.g., Abutalebi et al., 2012), conflict resolution (Bialystok, 2010), and attentional control (e.g., Martin-Rhee & Bialystok, 2008), and these advantages are observed in auditory (e.g., Moreno, Bialystok, Wodniecka, & Alain, 2010; Soveri, Laine, Hämäläinen, & Hugdahl, 2011), visual (e.g., Bialystok, 2008; Morales, Yudes, Gómez-Ariza, & Bajo, 2015), and audio-visual (e.g., Bialystok, Craik, & Ruocco, 2006; Krizman, Marian, Shook, Skoe, & Kraus, 2012) domains. For example, bilinguals have been shown to outperform monolinguals on the Simon task, a non-linguistic measure of executive control skill (e.g., Bialystok et al., 2005; Bialystok, Craik, Klein, & Viswanathan, 2004). However, the scope of bilingual advantages in executive control has been debated, with some recent studies failing to find differences between monolingual and bilingual groups (e.g., Hilchey & Klein, 2011; Paap & Greenberg, 2013). Indeed, it has been argued that any potential bilingual advantages are confined to very specific task circumstances that are limited in scope (Paap, Johnson, & Sawi, 2015). Therefore, there is a need for further studies extending bilingual executive control research from artificial, laboratory tasks to more ecologically-valid circumstances. Here, we examine bilinguals’ executive control performance in a real-world-like, multimodal visual search task. To examine bilinguals’ real-world performance within a multisensory environment, we designed a visual search task that contained multiple and varying auditory contexts. Monolinguals and bilinguals were asked to quickly locate an object while contending with the types of auditory-visual relationships that must be managed in the real world. In a natural environment, some visual search may occur in silence, with no auditory information to aid or hinder performance. However, it is more likely that auditory and visual inputs are simultaneously present. In such cases, sounds may correspond directly with relevant visual information (e.g., jingling keys), they may cue attention to visual items you would like to ignore (e.g., shuffling papers while you search for your keys), or they may signal objects that are not even within your visual field (e.g., a distant siren). The inclusion of all four of these audio-visual contexts ensured that cognitive control was being assessed in the most ecologically-valid settings. In a previous study exploring visual search ability, bilinguals displayed faster performance than monolinguals under difficult search conditions (Fr (...truncated)