John E. Marsh

Interference by Process, Not Content, Determines Semantic Auditory Distraction.

Distraction by irrelevant background sound of visually-based cognitive tasks illustrates the vulnerability of attentional selectivity across modalities. Four experiments centred on auditory distraction during tests of memory for visually-presented semantic information. Meaningful irrelevant speech disrupted the free recall of semantic category-exemplars more than meaningless irrelevant sound (Experiment 1). This effect was exacerbated when the irrelevant speech was semantically related to the to-be-remembered material (Experiment 2). Importantly, however, these effects of meaningfulness and semantic relatedness were shown to arise only when instructions emphasized recall by category rather than by serial order (Experiments 3 and 4). The results favor a process-oriented, rather than a structural, approach to the breakdown of attentional selectivity and forgetting: performance is impaired by the similarity of process brought to bear on the relevant and irrelevant material, not the similarity in item content.

Registered Replication Report

Trying to remember something now typically improves your ability to remember it later. However, after watching a video of a simulated bank robbery, participants who verbally described the robber were 25% worse at identifying the robber in a lineup than were participants who instead listed U.S. states and capitals—this has been termed the “verbal overshadowing” effect (Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990). More recent studies suggested that this effect might be substantially smaller than first reported. Given uncertainty about the effect size, the influence of this finding in the memory literature, and its practical importance for police procedures, we conducted two collections of preregistered direct replications (RRR1 and RRR2) that differed only in the order of the description task and a filler task. In RRR1, when the description task immediately followed the robbery, participants who provided a description were 4% less likely to select the robber than were those in the control condition. In RRR2, when the description was delayed by 20 min, they were 16% less likely to select the robber. These findings reveal a robust verbal overshadowing effect that is strongly influenced by the relative timing of the tasks. The discussion considers further implications of these replications for our understanding of verbal overshadowing.

Effects of speech on proofreading : can task-engagement manipulations shield against distraction?

This article reports 2 experiments that examine techniques to shield against the potentially disruptive effects of task-irrelevant background speech on proofreading. The participants searched for errors in texts that were either normal (i.e., written in Times New Roman font) or altered (i.e., presented either in Haettenschweiler font or in Times New Roman but masked by visual noise) in 2 sound conditions: a silent condition and a condition with background speech. Proofreading for semantic/contextual errors was impaired by speech, but only when the text was normal. This effect of speech was completely abolished when the text was written in an altered font (Experiment 1) or when it was masked by visual noise (Experiment 2). There was no functional difference between the 2 ways to alter the text with regard to the way the manipulations influenced the effects of background speech on proofreading. The results indicate that increased task demands, which lead to greater focal-task engagement, may shield against the distracting effects of background speech on proofreading.

Cross-modal distraction by background speech: What role for meaning?

Mental tasks are susceptible to disruption by concurrent to-be-ignored speech. The goal of the present paper is to examine whether a theoretical framework successfully applied to irrelevant speech effects in serial recall-interference by process-can be extended to verbal tasks in which meaning is the basis of retrieval and to which the irrelevant sound is related to different degrees by meaning. That the semantic characteristics of the to-be-ignored sound interact with the predominance of semantic retrieval in the focal task to determine the degree of disruption is demonstrated in three settings: free recall, category-clustering and fluency. Source monitoring-the difficulty in discriminating episodic information on the basis of the sense modality (visual or auditory) in which it was presented-contributes in part to the disruption by speech. The power of alternative accounts-interference-by-content and attentional capture-to predict these outcomes is also discussed.

Perceptual-gestural (mis)mapping in serial short-term memory: the impact of talker variability.

The mechanisms underlying the poorer serial recall of talker-variable lists (e.g., alternating female-male voices) as compared with single-voice lists were examined. We tested the novel hypothesis that this talker variability effect arises from the tendency for perceptual organization to partition the list into streams based on voice such that the representation of order maps poorly onto the formation of a gestural sequence-output plan assembled in support of the reproduction of the true temporal order of the items. In line with the hypothesis, (a) the presence of a spoken lead-in designed to further promote by-voice perceptual partitioning accentuates the effect (Experiments 1 and 2); (b) the impairment is larger the greater the acoustic coherence is between nonadjacent items: Alternating-voice lists are more poorly recalled than four-voice lists (Experiment 3); and (c) talker variability combines nonadditively with phonological similarity, consistent with the view that both variables disrupt sequence output planning (Experiment 4). The results support the view that serial short-term memory performance reflects the action of sequencing processes embodied within general-purpose perceptual input-processing and gestural output-planning systems.

Inhibitory control in memory: Evidence for negative priming in free recall

Cognitive control mechanisms--such as inhibition--decrease the likelihood that goal-directed activity is ceded to irrelevant events. Here, we use the action of auditory distraction to show how retrieval from episodic long-term memory is affected by competitor inhibition. Typically, a sequence of to-be-ignored spoken distracters drawn from the same semantic category as a list of visually presented to-be-recalled items impairs free recall performance. In line with competitor inhibition theory (Anderson, 2003), free recall was worse for items on a probe trial if they were a repeat of distracter items presented during the previous, prime, trial (Experiment 1). This effect was produced only when the distracters were dominant members of the same category as the to-be-recalled items on the prime. For prime trials in which distracters were low-dominant members of the to-be-remembered item category or were unrelated to that category--and hence not strong competitors for retrieval--positive priming was found (Experiments 2 and 3). These results are discussed in terms of inhibitory approaches to negative priming and memory retrieval.

High working memory capacity does not always attenuate distraction: Bayesian evidence in support of the null hypothesis

Individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) predict individual differences in basically all tasks that demand some form of cognitive labor, especially if the persons conducting the task are exposed to distraction. As such, tasks that measure WMC are very useful tools in individual-differences research. However, the predictive power of those tasks, combined with conventional statistical tools that cannot support the null hypothesis, also makes it difficult to study the limits of that power. In this article, we review studies that have failed to find a relationship between WMC and effects of auditory distraction on visual–verbal cognitive performance, and use meta-analytic Bayesian statistics to test the null hypothesis. The results favor the assumption that individual differences in WMC are, in fact, not (always) related to the magnitude of distraction. Implications for the nature of WMC are discussed.

Retrieval From Memory: Vulnerable or Inviolable?

We show that retrieval from semantic memory is vulnerable even to the mere presence of speech. Irrelevant speech impairs semantic fluency--namely, lexical retrieval cued by a semantic category name--but only if it is meaningful (forward speech compared to reversed speech or words compared to nonwords). Moreover, speech related semantically to the retrieval category is more disruptive than unrelated speech. That phonemic fluency--in which participants are cued with the first letter of words they are to report--was not disrupted by the mere presence of meaningful speech, only by speech in a related phonemic category, suggests that distraction is not mediated by executive processing load. The pattern of sensitivity to different properties of sound as a function of the type of retrieval cue is in line with an interference-by-process approach to auditory distraction.

How Concentration Shields Against Distraction

In this article, we outline our view of how concentration shields against distraction. We argue that higher levels of concentration make people less susceptible to distraction for two reasons. One reason is that the undesired processing of the background environment is reduced. For example, when people play a difficult video game, as opposed to an easy game, they are less likely to notice what people in the background are saying. The other reason is that the locus of attention becomes more steadfast. For example, when people are watching an entertaining episode of their favorite television series, as opposed to a less absorbing show, attention is less likely to be diverted away from the screen by a ringing telephone. The theoretical underpinnings of this perspective, and potential implications for applied settings, are addressed.

Expectations modulate the magnitude of attentional capture by auditory events.

What determines the magnitude of attentional capture by deviant sound events? We combined the cross-modal oddball distraction paradigm with sequence learning to address this question. Participants responded to visual targets, each preceded by tones that formed a repetitive cross-trial standard sequence. In Experiment 1, with the standard tone sequence …-660-440-660-880-… Hz, either the 440 Hz or the 880 Hz standard was occasionally replaced by one of two deviant tones (220 Hz and 1100 Hz), that either differed slightly (by 220 Hz) or markedly (by 660 Hz) from the replaced standard. In Experiment 2, with the standard tone sequence …-220-660-440-660-880-660-1100-… Hz, the 440 Hz and the 880 Hz standard was occasionally replaced by either a 220 Hz or a 1100 Hz pattern deviant. In both experiments, a high-pitch deviant was more captivating when it replaced a low-pitch standard, and a low-pitch deviant was more captivating when it replaced a high-pitch standard. These results indicate that the magnitude of attentional capture by deviant sound events depends on the discrepancy between the deviant event and the expected event, not on perceived local change.