Does Increased Cognitive Load Impact Response Times to Your Name?

Abstract

This present study investigates how visual cognitive load affects participants’ response times to hearing their name. We draw on previous work that found when subjects were visually distracted, they were faster in responding when their name is included in the alert. A dual-task was created, whereby participants responded to auditory alerts (by pressing either a left or right key) that were preceded by either their name or a random name, while they underwent a multiple object tracking (MOT) task. There was a manipulation of difficulty, in this case, the number of items to be tracked and the total object number. Performance for both tasks was recorded, to observe how different degrees of visual attentional load affect response times to auditory alerts. Data suggests participants were faster in responding to their own name, compared to a random name however, there was no interaction effect found on the MOT performance