Evidence for habituation of the irrelevant-sound effect on serial recall

Röer, Jan Philipp; Bell, Raoul; Buchner, Axel

doi:10.3758/s13421-013-0381-y

Cited by 74 publications

(101 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…An interesting aspect is that neither the foreknowledge provided in the present Experiments 1 and 2 nor the repeated presentation of upcoming distractors in previous studies (Bell et al, 2012;, 2014a, 2014b were sufficient to com pletely eliminate the disruption caused by auditory distractors. At first sight, this aspect may seem counterintuitive from the perspec tive of an attentional explanation of auditory distraction, which may be interpreted to imply that there should be a point at which distractors no longer attract any attention at all.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 87%

Specific foreknowledge reduces auditory distraction by irrelevant speech.

Röer¹,

Bell²,

Buchner³

2015

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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In a series of experiments, it was tested whether distraction by changing-state irrelevant speech is inevitable or can be modulated by foreknowledge of an imminent to-be-ignored distractor sequence. Participants were required to remember visually presented digits while ignoring background speech. In the foreknowledge condition of Experiment 1, the upcoming to-be-ignored sentence was presented auditorily and visually before each trial. With specific foreknowledge, the changing-state irrelevant sound effect (here, increased disruption by sentences compared with repeated words) was significantly attenuated relative to a condition without foreknowledge. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2, in which the information about the upcoming auditory distractor speech was presented only in the visual modality. Experiment 3 showed that only specific foreknowledge of the auditory distractor material has beneficial effects on the ability to ignore distraction. The mere notification that an unspecified distractor sentence would be presented next had no effect on distraction. In Experiment 4, there was only a small and not statistically significant reduction of the irrelevant speech effect when lists of randomly selected words were used as distractor material, suggesting that foreknowledge effects are more pronounced for highly variable, meaningful distractor material. We conclude that the disruption of short-term memory by irrelevant speech is not purely a stimulus-driven process that is immune to top-down control. A significant proportion of the effect can be modulated by specific knowledge about an imminent distractor sequence.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 87%

Specific foreknowledge reduces auditory distraction by irrelevant speech.

Röer¹,

Bell²,

Buchner³

2015

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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“…) and hence the conclusions we have drawn from them. Röer et al (2014) found that discretely-presented sentences played forwards were no more disruptive of serial recall than the same sentences played backwards. The first thing to note is that this null effect, if taken at face value, poses a problem not only for our stimulus-specific relevance hypothesis but also for the predictability-based account because a sentence is clearly more predictable than the same sentence presented backwards.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 88%

When is forewarned forearmed? Predicting auditory distraction in short-term memory.

Hughes¹,

Marsh

2020

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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Two experiments critically examined a predictive-coding based account of the vulnerability of short-term memory (STM) to auditory distraction, particularly the disruptive effect of changing-state sound on verbal serial recall. Experiment 1 showed that providing participants with the opportunity to predict the contents of an imminent spoken distractor sentence via a forewarning reduced its particularly disruptive effect but only to the same level of disruption as that produced by simpler changing-state sequences (a sequence of letter-names). Moreover, a postcategorically unpredictable changing-state sequence (e.g., “F, B, H, E, . . .”) was no more disruptive than a postcategorically predictable sequence (“A, B, C, D, . . .”). Experiment 2 showed that a sentence distractor was disruptive regardless of whether participants reported adopting a serial rehearsal strategy to perform the focal task (in this case, a missing-item task) whereas, critically, the disruptive effect of simpler changing-state sequences was only found in participants who reported using a serial rehearsal strategy. Moreover, when serial rehearsal was not used to perform the focal task, the disruptive effect of sentences was completely abolished by a forewarning. These results indicate that predictability plays no role in the classical changing-state irrelevant sound effect and that foreknowledge selectively attenuates a functionally distinct stimulus-specific attentional-diversion effect. As such, the results are at odds with a unitary, attentional account of auditory distraction in STM and instead strongly support a duplex-mechanism account.

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“…Hence, the BF for alternative over null is .082, or strong evidence in favour of the null. 3 Note that some programmes (e.g., Rouder, Speckman, Sun, Morey, & Iverson, 2009) provide Bayes factors in favour of the null over the alternative hypothesis, and all comments about evidence Ͻ1/3 or Ͼ3 being strong evidence for one hypothesis over the other must be inverted. Likelihoods are provided here for readers who wish to make these inversions for themselves without rerunning the full Bayes factor analyses.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Contrasting effects of changing rhythm and content on auditory distraction in immediate memory.

Parmentier¹,

Beaman²

2015

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne

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Across 5 experiments, the temporal regularity and content of an irrelevant speech stream were varied and their effects on a serial recall task examined. Variations of the content, but not the rhythm, of the irrelevant speech stimuli reliably disrupted serial recall performance in all experiments. Bayesian analyses supported the null hypothesis over the hypothesis that irregular rhythms would disrupt memory to a greater extent than regular rhythms. Pooling the data in a combined analysis revealed that regular presentation of the irrelevant speech was significantly more disruptive to serial recall than irregular presentation. These results are consistent with the idea that auditory distraction is sensitive to both intraitem and interitem relations and challenge an orienting-based account of auditory distraction.

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Evidence for habituation of the irrelevant-sound effect on serial recall

Cited by 74 publications

References 45 publications

Specific foreknowledge reduces auditory distraction by irrelevant speech.

Specific foreknowledge reduces auditory distraction by irrelevant speech.

When is forewarned forearmed? Predicting auditory distraction in short-term memory.

Contrasting effects of changing rhythm and content on auditory distraction in immediate memory.

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