Listen Out! Behavioural and Subjective Responses to Verbal Warnings

Ljungberg, Jessica K.; Parmentier, Fabrice B. R.; Hughes, Robert W.; Macken, William John; Jones, Dylan M.

doi:10.1002/acp.2818

Cited by 21 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…While the degree to which an event occurs unexpectedly seems to play an important role [8,9,24] there are other determinants as well that affect the capability of a stimulus to attract attention such as the valence of a distractor word [25,26] or the urgency with which a verbal warning is intoned. [27] Further, the recovery from attentional capture seems to depend partly on individual differences in working memory capacity, too: Participants with greater cognitive control abilities showed an increased habituation rate. [28] From an interference-by-process perspective [16,29] the disruptive effect of a distractor increases with the degree to which it competes for action.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Please silence your cell phone: Your ringtone captures other people′s attention

Röer¹,

Bell²,

Buchner³

2014

Noise Health

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Ringtones are designed to draw attention away from on-going activities. In the present study, it was investigated whether the disruptive effects of a ringing cell phone on short-term memory are inevitable or become smaller as a function of exposure and whether (self-) relevance plays a role. Participants performed a serial recall task either in silence or while task-irrelevant ringtones were presented. Performance was worse when a ringing phone had to be ignored, but gradually recovered compared with the quiet control condition with repeated presentation of the distractor sound. Whether the participant's own ringtone was played or that of a yoked-control partner did not affect performance and habituation rate. The results offer insight into auditory distraction by highly attention-demanding distractors and recovery therefrom. Implications for work environments and other applied settings are discussed.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Please silence your cell phone: Your ringtone captures other people′s attention

Röer¹,

Bell²,

Buchner³

2014

Noise Health

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“…In fact, recent evidence suggests that the capture of attention by urgently spoken word distracters can be especially detrimental when occurring while participants are encoding information in memory for later recall (Ljungberg, Parmentier, Hughes, Macken, & Jones, 2012). This evidence lends support to the contention that the smaller lengthening of reaction times for urgently spoken words than for nonurgently spoken words (all relative to the standard condition) must involve a response speeding for the former.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Impact of Intonation and Valence on Objective and Subjective Attention Capture by Auditory Alarms

Ljungberg

Parmentier

2012

Hum Factors

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Objective: The objective was to study the involuntary capture of attention by spoken words varying in intonation and valence. Background: In studies of verbal alarms, the propensity of alarms to capture attention has been primarily assessed with the use of subjective ratings of their perceived urgency. Past studies suggest that such ratings vary with the alarms’ spoken urgency and content. Method: We measured attention capture by spoken words varying in valence (negative vs. neutral) and intonation (urgently vs. nonurgently spoken) through subjective ratings and behavioral measures. The key behavioral measure was the response latency to visual stimuli in the presence of spoken words breaking away from the periodical repetition of a tone. Results: The results showed that all words captured attention relative to a baseline standard tone but that this effect was partly counteracted by a relative speeding of responses for urgently compared with nonurgently spoken words. Word valence did not affect behavioral performance. Rating data showed that both intonation and valence increased significantly perceived urgency and attention grabbing without any interaction. Conclusion: The data suggest a congruency between subjective ratings and behavioral performance with respect to spoken intonation but not valence. Application: This study demonstrates the usefulness and feasibility of objective measures of attention capture to help design efficient alarm systems.

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“…In a typical experiment, participants must recall lists of visually presented items (usually digits) in the order of their presentation. When task-irrelevant, to-be-ignored background sound is played, serial recall performance is reduced compared to a quiet control condition (Colle & Welsh, 1976; see also Elliott, 2002; Ljungberg, Parmentier, Hughes, Macken & Jones, 2012; Marsh, Hughes & Jones, 2009; Röer, Bell & Buchner, 2013; Salamé & Baddeley, 1982). This reduction is largely independent of the auditory distractors’ sound level (Ellermeier & Hellbrück, 1998), and of whether the distractors are played during item encoding or maintenance (Jones, Madden & Miles, 1992; Röer, Bell & Buchner, 2014c).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Metacognition in Auditory Distraction: How Expectations about Distractibility Influence the Irrelevant Sound Effect

Röer¹,

Rummel

Bell

et al. 2017

Journal of Cognition

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Task-irrelevant, to-be-ignored sound disrupts serial short-term memory for visually presented items compared to a quiet control condition. We tested whether disruption by changing state irrelevant sound is modulated by expectations about the degree to which distractors would disrupt serial recall performance. The participants' expectations were manipulated by providing the (bogus) information that the irrelevant sound would be either easy or difficult to ignore. In Experiment 1, piano melodies were used as auditory distractors. Participants who expected the degree of disruption to be low made more errors in serial recall than participants who expected the degree of disruption to be high, independent of whether distractors were present or not. Although expectation had no effect on the magnitude of disruption, participants in the easy-to-ignore group reported after the experiment that they were less disrupted by the irrelevant sound than participants in the difficult-to-ignore group. In Experiment 2, spoken texts were used as auditory distractors. Expectations about the degree of disruption did not affect serial recall performance. Moreover, the subjective and objective distraction by irrelevant speech was similar in the easy-to-ignore group and in the difficult-to-ignore group. Thus, while metacognitive beliefs about whether the auditory distractors would be easy or difficult to ignore can have an effect on task engagement and subjective distractibility ratings, they do not seem to have an effect on the actual degree to which the auditory distractors disrupt serial recall performance.

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Listen Out! Behavioural and Subjective Responses to Verbal Warnings

Cited by 21 publications

References 35 publications

Please silence your cell phone: Your ringtone captures other people′s attention

Please silence your cell phone: Your ringtone captures other people′s attention

The Impact of Intonation and Valence on Objective and Subjective Attention Capture by Auditory Alarms

Metacognition in Auditory Distraction: How Expectations about Distractibility Influence the Irrelevant Sound Effect

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