Resolving Conflict in the Auditory Modality: Spectrotemporal Characterization of a Speech-Based Flanker Task

To date, there is no auditory equivalent of the intuitive “arrows flanker task”, which has seen wide adoption in the study of cognitive development and neuropsychological deficits. In the auditory modality, only speech has the same overleaned symbolic value as arrows, but concurrent target and flanker speech raises the possibility of perceptual masking. In a series of three experiments, using 142 healthy young adults aged 18 – 24 (mean 19.5, SD 1.4 years of age, 65 female), we demonstrate that the risk for masking varies with the spectral separation between the voices and the direction of attention. Similarly to spatial separation in visual tasks, spectral separation also influences the strength of conflict effects. A fourth study using 22 healthy young adults aged 18 – 23 (mean 19.6, SD 1.5, 10 female) reveals slightly better within-day test-retest reliability and similar distributional properties for the speech-based versus the arrows task.