Do interpreters have better developed executive control skills compared to other language professionals?

Working memory refers to the brain system that allows us to hold information on-line and manipulate it for short periods of time (Baddeley 1992). In interpreting research, working memory is considered one of the most important cognitive aspects of simultaneous interpreting. This has led to the general assumption that interpreters have superior memory skills, yet empirical studies comparing interpreters’ and non-interpreters’ memory capacity have yielded contradictory results (Köpke and Signorelli 2012). Allegedly, how memory storage is used is paramount to actual storage capacity. Therefore, scholars have recently directed their attention to working memory’s central executive, an attentional-controlling system that allows us to maintain or suppress information and to coordinate or switch between tasks (Baddeley 1996). With the intention of providing more empirical evidence on interpreters’ memory skills, we focus on three executive functions (updating, inhibiting and shifting). These were tested using computer-based response tasks, which were counterbalanced across participants. The ‘updating’ function was tested using a 2-back task, which requires participants to compare incoming information to information already held in the memory. The ‘inhibition’ function requires participants to ignore irrelevant stimuli and focus on the task at hand and was tested by means of an Attention Network Task and a Simon task. Finally, the ‘shifting’ function was gauged with a switch task in which participants need to stop one task in order to start a new one. In a pilot study, 30 undergraduate students in the early stages of a professional training in either translation or interpreting performed the tasks. Data-analysis showed no significant differences between both groups. The follow-up study presented here applies the same methodology and contains data from two groups of professional translators and interpreters. We expect to identify an interpreter advantage in the three executive control tasks, which would emphasize the importance of training and experience