Why are background telephone conversations distracting?

Marsh, John E.; Ljung, Robert; Jahncke, Helena; MacCutcheon, Douglas; Pausch, Florian; Ball, Linden J.; Vachon, François

doi:10.1037/xap0000170

Cited by 20 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 94 publications

(287 reference statements)

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“…This result, however, is consistent with previous studies showing that manipulations designed to increase perceptual demand, such as the perceptual degradation of task-relevant material (Hughes et al, 2013;Marsh, Sörqvist, & Hughes, 2015) or the use of a disfluent i.e. difficultto-read font (Halin et al, 2014;Marsh, Ljung et al, 2018) can reduce or even abolish auditory distraction without having an impact on task performance. According to Sörqvist and Marsh (2015), when task difficulty is high, people make a compensatory upward shift in concentration in order to maintain their desired ttention…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 91%

The automaticity of semantic processing revisited: Auditory distraction by a categorical deviation.

Vachon¹,

Marsh²,

Labonté³

2020

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Automatic information processing has been and still is a debated topic. Traditionally, automatic processes are deemed to take place autonomously and independently of top-down cognitive control. For decades, the literature on reading has brought to the fore empirical phenomena such as Stroop and semantic priming effects that provide support for the assumption that semantic information can be accessed automatically. More recently, there has been growing evidence that semantic processing is in fact susceptible to higher level cognitive influences, suggesting that this form of processing is instead conditionally automatic. The purpose of the present study was to revisit this debate using a novel approach: the automatic access to the meaning of irrelevant auditory stimuli was tested through the assessment of their distractive power. More specifically, we aimed to examine whether a categorical change in the content of to-be-ignored auditory sequences composed of speech items that are personally non-significant to participants (e.g., a digit among letters) can disrupt an unrelated visual focal task. In seven experiments, we assessed this categorical deviation effect and its functional properties. We established that distraction by categorical deviation is non-contingent on the activated task set and appears resistant to topdown control manipulations. By suggesting not only that the semantic content of the irrelevant sound can be extracted preattentively, but also that such semantic activation is ineluctable during auditory distraction, these findings shed new light on the automatic nature of semantic processing.

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Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 91%

The automaticity of semantic processing revisited: Auditory distraction by a categorical deviation.

Vachon¹,

Marsh²,

Labonté³

2020

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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“…There is some evidence to suggest that the content of the speech may influence the amount of distraction. For example, hearing only one side of a telephone conversation is more distracting than hearing both sides of the conversation, presumably because the former type of speech is less predictable than the latter (Emberson, Lupyan, Goldstein, & Spivey, 2010;Marsh et al, 2018). In a similar fashion, engaging speech may be more likely to attract attention away from the main task and thus lead to a greater disruption in comprehension.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading is disrupted by intelligible background speech: Evidence from eye-tracking.

Vasilev¹,

Liversedge²,

Rowan³

et al. 2019

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor

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It is not well understood whether background speech affects the initial processing of words during reading or only the later processes of sentence integration. Additionally, it is not clear how eye-movements support text comprehension in the face of distraction by background speech and noise. In the present research, participants read single sentences (Experiment 1) and short paragraphs (Experiments 2-3) in four sound conditions: silence, speech-spectrum Gaussian noise, English speech (intelligible to participants), and Mandarin speech (unintelligible to participants). Intelligible speech did not affect the lexical access of words and had a limited effect on the firstpass fixations of words. However, it led to more regressions and more re-reading fixations compared to both unintelligible speech and silence. The results suggested that the distraction is mostly semantic in nature, and there was only limited evidence for a contribution of phonology. Finally, intelligible speech disrupted comprehension only when participants were prevented from re-reading previous words. These findings suggest that the semantic properties of irrelevant speech can disrupt the ongoing reading process, but that this disruption occurs in the post-lexical stages of reading when participants need to integrate words to form the sentence context and to construct a coherent discourse of the text.

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“…This approach meant that we could for the first time examine any influence of encoding load on auditory distraction without altering the actual visual stimuli across different levels of load (cf. e.g., Halin, Marsh, & Sörqvist, 2015;Hughes et al, 2013;Marsh, Ljung, et al, 2018a;Marsh, Yang, et al, 2018b) which has, in other settings, complicated the interpretation of load effects on selective attention (Benoni & Tsal, 2013;Tsal & Benoni, 2010;Wilson et al, 2011). Experiment 1 showed that high load eliminated the otherwise disruptive effect of a deviant sound within an irrelevant sound sequence (e.g., Hughes et al, 2005) while Experiment 2 showed that the disruptive effect of a changingcompared to steady-state sequence (cf.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On this approach, no limit on processing is necessarily assumed, and the theoretical question shifts to how the potential interference flowing from that processing is cognitively controlled (for an in-depth discussions, see, e.g., Allport, 1993;Neumann, 1996;Tipper, 2001). The present study builds in particular on recent research suggesting that the degree to which task-irrelevant auditory input impinges on task performance is dictated in part by the degree to which top-down control can be imposed to regulate the level of engagement in the focal task (Hughes, Hurlstone, Marsh, Vachon, & Jones, 2013;Marsh, Ljung, et al, 2018a;Marsh, Sörqvist, & Hughes, 2015a;Marsh, Yang, et al, 2018b). When a boost in engagement is promoted by an increase in task demands, or when engagement-control is relatively great in the first place due to a high trait capacity for executive control -as indicated by measures of working memory capacity [WMC]; (Engle & Kane, 2004)-, certain kinds of auditory distraction are attenuated if not eliminated (Hughes et al, 2013;Marsh, Sörqvist, Hodgetts, Beaman, & Jones, 2015a;Marsh, Sörqvist, & Hughes, 2015b;Marsh, Vachon, & Sörqvist, 2017;Sörqvist, 2010; though see Körner, Röer, Buchner, & Bell, 2017;Hughes and Marsh 2019).…”

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confidence: 99%

How the deployment of visual attention modulates auditory distraction

Marsh

Campbell

Vachon

et al. 2019

Atten Percept Psychophys

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Classically, attentional selectivity has been conceptualized as a passive by-product of capacity limits on stimulus processing. Here, we examine the role of more active cognitive control processes in attentional selectivity, focusing on how distraction from task-irrelevant sound is modulated by levels of task engagement in a visually presented short-term memory task. Task engagement was varied by manipulating the load involved in the encoding of the (visually presented) to-be-remembered items. Using a list of Navon letters (where a large letter is composed of smaller, different-identity letters), participants were oriented to attend and serially recall the list of large letters (low encoding load) or to attend and serially recall the list of small letters (high encoding load). Attentional capture by a single deviant noise burst within a task-irrelevant tone sequence (the deviation effect) was eliminated under high encoding load (Experiment 1). However, distraction from a continuously changing sequence of tones (the changing-state effect) was immune to the influence of load (Experiment 2). This dissociation in the amenability of the deviation effect and the changing-state effect to cognitive control supports a duplex-mechanism over a unitary-mechanism account of auditory distraction in which the deviation effect is due to attentional capture whereas the changing-state effect reflects direct interference between the processing of the sound and processes involved in the focal task. That the changing-state effect survives high encoding load also goes against an alternative explanation of the attenuation of the deviation effect under high load in terms of the depletion of a limited perceptual resource that would result in diminished auditory processing.

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Why are background telephone conversations distracting?

Cited by 20 publications

References 94 publications

The automaticity of semantic processing revisited: Auditory distraction by a categorical deviation.

The automaticity of semantic processing revisited: Auditory distraction by a categorical deviation.

Reading is disrupted by intelligible background speech: Evidence from eye-tracking.

How the deployment of visual attention modulates auditory distraction

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