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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Participants performed serial recall while ignoring sequences of spoken letters. • Sequences containing deviant and/or changing sounds disrupted performance. • Phasic (rapid) pupil dilations were only elicited by deviant, not changing, sound. • Changing sound produced global tonic (slow) enlargement of the pupil size. • Attention capture seems to underly distraction by deviant, not changing, sound. Abstract The mere presence of task-irrelevant auditory stimuli is known to interfere with cognitive functioning. Disruption can be caused by changing auditory distractors (the changing-state effect) or by a sound that deviates from the auditory background (the deviation effect). The unitary account of auditory distraction explains both phenomena in terms of attentional capture whereas the duplex-mechanism account posits that they reflect two fundamentally different forms of distraction in which only the deviation effect is caused by attentional capture. To test these predictions, we exploited a physiological index of attention orienting: the pupillary dilation response (PDR). Participants performed visual serial recall while ignoring sequences of spoken letters. These sequences either comprised repeated or changing letters, and one letter could sometimes be replaced by pink noise (the deviant). Recall was poorer in both changing-state and deviant trials. Interestingly, the PDR was elicited by deviant sounds but not changing-state sounds, while a tonic increase in pupil size was found throughout changing-state trials. This physiological dissociation of the changing-state and the deviation effects suggests they are subtended by distinct mechanisms thereby procuring support for the duplex-mechanism account over the unitary account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The processing of the relation between targets and distracters which underpins the impairment in memory for visually presented words when accompanied by semantically related auditory distracters—the between-sequence semantic similarity effect—might also disambiguate category membership of to-be-remembered words, bringing about improved memory for these words at recall. In this series of experiments the usual impairment of the between-sequence semantic similarity effect is reversed: we show that related distracters can improve memory performance when multiple-category lists are studied and a category-cued recall test is used at retrieval. The results indicate not only that irrelevant speech distracters are routinely processed for meaning, but also that semantic information gleaned from this stream is retained until recall of the memoranda is cued. The data are consistent with a revised interaction-by-process framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three experiments investigated memory for semantic information with the goal of determining boundary conditions for the manifestation of semantic auditory distraction. Irrelevant speech disrupted the free recall of semantic category- exemplars to an equal degree regardless of whether the speech coincided with presentation or test phases of the task (Experiment 1), and this occurred regardless of whether it comprised random words or coherent sentences (Experiment 2). The effects of background speech were greater when the irrelevant speech was semantically related to the to-be-remembered material, but only when the irrelevant words were high in output dominance (Experiment 3). The implications of these findings in relation to the processing of task material and the processing of background speech are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of top-down cognitive control on 2 putatively distinct forms of distraction was investigated. Attentional capture by a task-irrelevant auditory deviation (e.g., a female-spoken token following a sequence of male-spoken tokens)--as indexed by its disruption of a visually presented recall task--was abolished when focal-task engagement was promoted either by increasing the difficulty of encoding the visual to-be-remembered stimuli (by reducing their perceptual discriminability; Experiments 1 and 2) or by providing foreknowledge of an imminent deviation (Experiment 2). In contrast, distraction from continuously changing auditory stimuli ("changing-state effect") was not modulated by task-difficulty or foreknowledge (Experiment 3). We also confirmed that individual differences in working memory capacity--typically associated with maintaining task-engagement in the face of distraction--predict the magnitude of the deviation effect, but not the changing-state effect. This convergence of experimental and psychometric data strongly supports a duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction: Auditory attentional capture (deviation effect) is open to top-down cognitive control, whereas auditory distraction caused by direct conflict between the sound and focal-task processing (changing-state effect) is relatively immune to such control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: 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. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Five experiments demonstrate auditory-semantic distraction in tests of memory for semantic category-exemplars. The effects of irrelevant sound on category-exemplar recall are shown to be functionally distinct from those found in the context of serial short-term memory by showing sensitivity to: The lexical-semantic, rather than acoustic, properties of sound (Experiment 1) and between-sequence semantic similarity (Experiments 1–5) but only under conditions in which the task is free, not serial, recall (Experiment 3) and when the irrelevant sound items are dominant members of a semantic category (Experiment 4). The experiments also reveal evidence of a breakdown of a source-monitoring process under conditions of between-sequence semantic similarity (Experiments 2–5). Results are discussed in terms of activation and inhibition accounts and support a dynamic, process-oriented, rather than a structurally based, account of forgetting. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Sörqvist, P., Nöstl, A. & Halin, N. (2012). Disruption of writing processes by the semanticity of background speech. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 53, 97-102. Previous studies have noted that writing processes are impaired by task-irrelevant background sound. However, what makes sound distracting to writing processes has remained unaddressed. The experiment reported here investigated whether the semanticity of irrelevant speech contributes to disruption of writing processes beyond the acoustic properties of the sound. The participants wrote stories against a background of normal speech, spectrally-rotated speech (i.e., a meaningless sound with marked acoustic resemblance to speech) or silence. Normal speech impaired quantitative (e.g., number of characters produced) and qualitative/semantic (e.g., uncorrected typing errors, proposition generation) aspects of the written material, in comparison with the other two sound conditions, and it increased the duration of pauses between words. No difference was found between the silent and the rotated-speech condition. These results suggest that writing is susceptible to disruption from the semanticity of speech but not especially susceptible to disruption from the acoustic properties of speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]