Forfattere
Laoura Ziaka & Athanassios Protopapas
Sammendrag
When naming a sequence of multiple items that are displayed simultaneously, performance decreases during the course of the task but does not collapse, indicating effective management of cognitive overload. We attribute this to a strategic shift from a more parallel to a more serial processing, whereby the processing of the current item is prioritized over upcoming items, termed "lockout scheduling". Here, we investigate this proposal by examining within-task modulations of articulation and the distance between gaze and voice ("eye-voice span") in multi-item color naming tasks with and without internal interference. The results showed dynamic changes in both eye-voice span and articulation measures, consistent with the gradual implementation of a lockout-scheduling strategy in response to emerging cognitive overload. The observed patterns indicate that the shift from a more parallel to a more serial processing is not an all-or-none phenomenon but a dynamic interplay between gaze, voice, and covert attention, affecting online decisions about spatial distance, timing, and the allocation of processing resources.