The Assessment of Bilingualism on Spatial Attention

Abstract

The ability to speak more than one language is considered advantageous for several reasons, including increased communication, networking, and professional and social opportunities. Beyond these practical advantages, there has been extensive research dedicated to understanding the cognitive effects associated with bilingualism. A growing body of work has largely employed paradigms to measure executive function (EF) in prefrontal areas of the brain, a system associated with goal maintenance, distractor-inhibition, and task-switching. In this investigation, we examined the possibility of increased attentional capabilities in bilingual participants by using a visual-attention-based paradigm that measures attentional capture. In each trial participants searched for a unique color target, and, in half of the trials, an additional non-target distractor abruptly appeared in the display that captured their attention. Based on previous literature that showed that bilinguals have greater inhibitory control, we predicted that the onset of the distracting item would distract monolinguals to a greater extent than bilinguals. In addition to a measure of inhibitory control, this paradigm also measures target disengagement (i.e., enhanced top-down guidance) from the distractor after their attention was captured by the distractor stimulus. Interestingly, bilinguals were on average 31ms faster to detect the target compared to monolinguals in both distractor present and absent conditions, showing that the distracting element did not capture attention to the same extent as it did for monolinguals. However, despite this relatively large response latency advantage the findings failed to reach statistical significance. Limitations and future extensions will be discussed with the consideration of more homogenized bilingual and monolingual groups and extending the study to measure oculomotor movements (saccades and fixations) to assess additional indexes of spatial awareness and visual search behavior.