Individual Differences in Real-Time Information Coordination: Relating Dynamic Spatial and Verbal Information

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Abstract
Past research has suggested that a coordination ability may critically contribute in the capacity to control attention in situations of increased mental load. Evidence for such an ability was sought by analyzing individual differences in performance in a complex, real-time task. The task required the integration of information obtained from visual and verbal processing channels to produce a single response. Subjects saw two objects moving across a visual display and had to determine the veracity of a verbal statement about the objects, e.g., “object A is not moving faster than object B.” Verbal statements varied in syntactic complexity and truth value and visual displays varied in the relative speed ratio of the moving objects. Male and female subjects (N = 60) performed the verbal and spatial tasks alone and in combination across testing sessions. Gender differences were obtained for the speed judgment task with males demonstrating greater sensitivity in detecting speed differences. Support for a general coordination ability was weak in the full sample. However, when male and female data were analyzed separately, evidence was obtained among females for the contribution of a coordination ability in performing the combined task. The latter finding is attributed to male-female differences in the resource load associated with processing dynamic spatial information.