Managing attention in multispeaker environments is a challenging feat that is critical for human performance. However, why some people are better than others in allocating attention appropriately remains highly unknown. Here, we investigated the contribution of two factors—working memory capacity (WMC) and professional experience—to performance on two different types of attention task: selective attention to one speaker and distributed attention among multiple concurrent speakers. We compared performance across three groups: individuals with low (n = 20) and high (n = 25) WMC, and aircraft pilots (n = 24), whose profession poses extremely high demands for both selective and distributed attention to speech. Results suggests that selective attention is highly effective, with good performance maintained under increasingly adverse conditions, whereas performance decreases substantially with the requirement to distribute attention among a larger number of speakers. Importantly, both types of attention benefit from higher WMC, suggesting reliance on some common capacity-limited resources. However, only selective attention was further improved in the pilots, pointing to its flexible and trainable nature, whereas distributed attention seems to suffer from more fixed and severe processing bottlenecks.

在多扬声器环境中管理注意力是一项艰巨的任务，对人类绩效至关重要。但是，为什么人们在适当分配注意力方面比其他人更好呢，仍然是一个未知数。在这里，我们调查了两个因素（工作记忆容量（WMC）和专业经验）对两种不同类型的注意力任务的表现的贡献：选择性地关注一位讲话者和在多个并发讲话者之间分配注意力。我们比较了三组的性能：低（n = 20）和高（n = 25）WMC的个人，以及飞机驾驶员（n= 24），其职业对语音的选择性和分散注意力提出了很高的要求。结果表明，选择性注意是非常有效的，在日益恶劣的条件下仍保持良好的表现，而由于需要在更多的发言者中分配注意力，因此表现大大下降。重要的是，两种类型的关注都得益于更高的WMC，这表明它们依赖于一些常见的容量受限资源。但是，飞行员的选择性和灵活性得到了进一步提高，表明其灵活性和可训练性，而分布式注意力似乎受到更多固定和严重的处理瓶颈的困扰。