The irrelevant sound effect: Does speech play a special role?

Abstract

Memory for order is markedly impaired by the presence of irrelevant sound, even though participants are instructed to ignore the sound. Although a great deal of research has disclosed some features of the task and of the sound that augment or reduce the degree of interference, one important issue of the irrelevant sound effect not yet resolved is whether speech has a special status. This study revealed, within a design of adequate power, that the same physical stimulus (sine wave speech), whether perceived as speech or as nonspeech sound, produces similar degrees of disruption and is less disruptive of serial recall than natural speech. This outcome suggests that the acoustic constituents of sound rather than its source are most influential in determining the impact of irrelevant material.

High working memory capacity attenuates the deviation effect but not the changing-state effect: Further support for the duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction

“…First, the authors failed to find a similar relationship with spoken-letter sequences in the same experiment. This is alarming because a large body of evidence suggests that tone sequences and spoken-letter sequences produce qualitatively equal (changing-state) effects on serial recall (e.g., Jones & Macken, 1993;Tremblay, Nicholls, Alford, & Jones, 2000; for a review, see Macken et al, 1999). Second, a handful of experiments have failed to find relationships between memory capacity and the changing-state effect (Beaman, 2004;Ellermeier & Zimmer, 1997;Neath, Farley, & Surprenant, 2003), including the present experiments and an experiment (Elseen in Figure 3, the changing-state effect was replicated.…”

The impact of auditory distraction on retrieval of visual memories

“…The absence of an effect of white noise on episodic retrieval, as found in our study, is comparable to the results of studies on immediate serial recall. Notably, the impact of the ISE is absent for unaware sign-wave speech and increases from meaningless speech sounds to natural, intelligible speech (Tremblay et al, 2000), a finding that is similar to the impact of café sounds in the AD condition (i.e., a mixture of ambient restaurant noise and a few decipherable spoken words). An interesting difference is that in the present study, auditory distraction did not negatively impact overall recognition (i.e., AD did not affect d′), yet irrelevant speech diminishes performance in studies of immediate serial recall (Beaman, 2005;Marsh et al, 2009).…”

“…Effects of auditory distraction have been previously shown to disrupt optimal WM performance (Chein & Fiez, 2010), as well as performance on counting tasks (Buchner, Steffens, Irmen, & Wender, 1998;Logie & Baddeley, 1987) and tests of immediate or serial recall (Campbell et al, 2002;Marsh, Hughes, & Jones, 2009;Salame & Baddeley, 1982;Tremblay et al, 2000). Therefore, susceptibility to the negative impact of auditory distraction is common to both maintenance of WM and Fig.…”

“…Research examining the effects of irrelevant background sound on tasks involving working memory (WM) maintenance has revealed a negative impact on immediate serial recall (Beaman, 2005;Campbell, Beaman, & Berry, 2002;Tremblay, Nicholls, Alford, & Jones, 2000), as well as significant changes in neural activity associated with concurrent task-relevant visual processing (Weisz & Schlittmeier, 2006). The irrelevant sound effect (ISE) is the decline in accuracy for immediate memory of serial order when the test is completed in the presence of irrelevant sound, relative to complete silence.…”

Interference of Speech and Interior Noise of Chinese High-Speed Trains with Task Performance

“…Longer distance can reduce auditory distraction by smoothing the perceived variation of sound characters [23,24,25] and by decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio [26,27]. Auditory attention is influenced by other factors such as reverberation [28], the familiarity with the languages of the interfering speech [27,29,30] and combined stimuli. Moreover, substantial intersubject variation exists [31,32,33,34].…”