Interpreting Training Enhances Working Memory And Domain-general Cognitive Skills

Recent research in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience has shown that language experts may transfer their acquired skills to non-linguistic domains,possibly due to the cognitive benefits from linguistic tasks.This “transfer effect” should be reflected in professional interpreters,especially simultaneous interpreters(SIs),who developed efficient use of working memory(WM),as well as enhanced domain-general cognitive skills to ensure their performance in this extremely challenging task.Although interpreting has become a focus of empirical interest in the study of bilingualism,its cognitive benefits are poorly specified.To bridge this knowledge gap,the main goal of the present study is to explore whether trainee SIs exhibit differential responses at both behavioral and cortical level in tasks that measure WM and attentional control,and to elucidate how SI training shapes our mind and brain.The aim of Experiment 1 is to investigate in what specific aspect does SI training enhance WM.Specially,we focused on updating,a function that closely related to the interpreting task.Twenty trainee SIs and 20 non-trained controls who had equivalent proficiency of L1 and L2 were tested in both single and dual n-back tasks.The results showed that although both groups committed more errors and reacted slower with the increase of memory load(1-back to 3-back),SI training group was generally better than their counterpart in terms of accuracy and reaction time(RT).Our findings indicated that SI training could enhance the updating skill of WM,which is closely related to its executive functioning.In Experiment 2,we further investigated whether SI training could influence a widespread network of attentional control.We explicitly examined the three attentional networks between 14 trainee SIs and 16 highly proficient nontrained bilingual controls using the Attention Network Test(ANT).We identified differential attentional network dynamics between alertness and orienting.In particular,cueing effect was more prominent in the control group compared with the SI training group,especially in the warning tone condition,which indicated that SI training equipped trainees with higher arousal,and enhanced responsiveness to the contextual cues.We also conducted an event-related potential(ERP)study to examine the cortical responses during auditory processing using the classic auditory oddball paradigm in our third experiment.The ERP results revealed that the detection of rare target tones in a sequence of frequent non-target tones elicited attenuated P3 in trainee SIs compared with the non-trained counterpart,even though their behavioral results were not significantly different.As a pilot study,our results provided initial findings that trainee SIs were better at focusing their attention on the task-relevant information,and filtering out the task-irrelevant interferences due to their enhanced attentional control capacity.To sum up,our three experiments provided behavioral and electrophysiological evidence that SI training could enhance WM and attentional control which are highly related to the interpreting task.The present study provided theoretical and empirical implications for the nature and neural basis of interpreting training.Moreover,it could help understand how expertise in language domain may influence cognitive skills in non-linguistic domains.