Sound disrupts short-term retention in working memory even when the sound is completely irrelevant and has to be ignored. The dominant view in the literature is that this type of disruption is ...essentially limited to so-called changing-state distractor sequences with acoustic changes between successive distractor objects (e.g., "ABABABAB") and does not occur with so-called steady-state distractor sequences that are composed of a single repeated distractor object (e.g., "AAAAAAAA"). Here we show that this view can no longer be maintained. What is more, disruption by steady-state distractors is significantly reduced after preexposure to the distractor item, directly confirming a central assumption of attentional explanations of auditory distraction and parallel to what has been shown earlier for changing-state sounds. Taken together, the findings reported here are compatible with a graded attentional account of auditory disruption, and they are incompatible with the duplex-mechanism account.
Public Significance Statement
Earlier conclusions that sequences consisting of a single repeated auditory distractor object-so-called steady-state sequences-cause basically no disruption of immediate serial recall can no longer be maintained. Disruption by steady-state distractors is significantly reduced after preexposure to the distractor item, directly confirming a central assumption of attentional explanations of auditory distraction. These results are consistent with the graded attentional account of auditory distraction, and inconsistent with the duplex-mechanism account.
Previous studies suggest that task-irrelevant changing-state sound interferes specifically with the processing of serial order information in the focal task (e.g., serial recall from short-term ...memory), whereas a deviant sound in the auditory background is supposed to divert central attention, thus producing distraction in various types of cognitive tasks. Much of the evidence for this distinction rests on the observed dissociations in auditory distraction between serial and non-serial short-term memory tasks. In this study, both the changing-state effect and the deviation effect were contrasted between serial digit recall and mental arithmetic tasks. In three experiments (two conducted online), changing-state sound was found to disrupt serial recall, but it did not lead to a general decrement in performance in different mental arithmetic tasks. In contrast, a deviant voice in the stream of irrelevant speech sounds did not cause reliable distraction in serial recall and simple addition/subtraction tasks, but it did disrupt a more demanding mental arithmetic task. Specifically, the evaluation of math equations (multiplication and addition/subtraction), which was combined with a pair-associate memory task to increase the task demand, was found to be susceptible to auditory distraction in participants who did not serially rehearse the pair-associates. Together, the results support the assumption that the interference produced by changing-state sound is highly specific to tasks that require serial-order processing, whereas auditory deviants may cause attentional capture primarily in highly demanding cognitive tasks (e.g., mental arithmetic) that cannot be solved through serial rehearsal.
The decrement in memory performance observed while listeners are being exposed to acoustically structured stimuli is called the irrelevant sound effect (ISE). The present review summarizes the ...research identifying physical features of the irrelevant background that reliably induce performance decrements. It shows that speech, or speech analogues, produce the largest effects by far, suggesting that speech-specific features may contribute to auditory distraction. When an attempt is made to isolate psychoacoustical parameters contributing to the effect, it turns out that noticeable spectral change over time is a necessary condition to observe an ISE, while level change by itself is not. New empirical evidence is presented determining the rate of frequency modulation at which maximal effects are obtained. Results of a further study employing noise-vocoded speech show the importance of spectral detail in producing an ISE. At present, the wealth of empirical findings on the effects of irrelevant sound is not well accounted for by the available theoretical models. Cognitive models make only qualitative predictions, and psychoacoustical models (e.g., those based on fluctuation strength or the speech transmission index) account for subsets of the available data, but have thus far failed to capture the combined effects of temporal structure and spectral change in generating the interference.
There is some research indicating that the presence of music adversely impacts academic task performance. While most of this research involves individuals reading text passages, few studies have ...explored how graphical representations contribute to the auditory distraction literature. The aim of our study was to investigate if concept maps, a graphical representation that depicts relations among concepts, and linear text differentially affect recall when they are studied in the presence of music. Participants studied a preconstructed concept map or text summary while listening to verbal or nonverbal music. Results indicated that participants who studied the concept map with verbal music recalled significantly more ideas than those who studied the text summary. This result was particularly robust for those with low to moderate prior knowledge in the domain being studied. These findings suggest that the novel structure of concept maps may induce greater concentration, which could provide protection against auditory distraction.
•In situ assessment of effects of office noise on cognitive performance and annoyance.•Use of sound level measurements to assess impact of background speech on workers.•Percentile level differences ...of sound conditions correlate with effects on workers.•No clear relationships of energy-equivalent sound levels with performance and annoyance.•Level statistics consider effects on performance and perception in occupied offices.
Acoustical privacy is one of the most crucial, yet least satisfying aspects in open-plan offices. Irrelevant background speech impairs acoustic satisfaction and cognitive performance. Assessing acoustical conditions in occupied offices is challenging, and thus room acoustic parameters are commonly determined in unoccupied offices. In German speaking countries the rating level of noise is an important parameter occupational safety and health practitioners in the field often use to assess the acoustical conditions in occupied offices. The rating level denotes the energy-equivalent sound pressure level during a measurement period in an occupied office with speech sounds and takes penalties for tonal, informational and impulsive constituents into account. There is little evidence that the rating level correlates with the well-being, performance or health of office workers. As part of this study 89 different sound conditions under which subjects have to complete a number recall task and a questionnaire in laboratory conditions are evaluated with respect to their relationships with the rating level. In addition, these results are compared to percentile level statistics suggested as an alternative approach to assess the acoustical quality of office workplaces. Higher differences between the 10th and 90th percentile levels measured with fast time weighting lead to lower number recall performances and higher annoyance ratings whilst the rating level does not show any clear relationships.
Immediate serial recall of visually presented items is reliably impaired by task-irrelevant speech that the participants are instructed to ignore (“irrelevant speech effect,” ISE). The ISE is ...stronger with changing speech tokens (words or syllables) when compared to repetitions of single tokens (“changing-state effect,” CSE). These phenomena have been attributed to sound-induced diversions of attention away from the focal task (attention capture account), or to specific interference of obligatory, involuntary sound processing with either the integrity of phonological traces in a phonological short-term store (phonological loop account), or the efficiency of a domain-general rehearsal process employed for serial order retention (changing-state account). Aiming to further explore the role of attention, phonological coding, and serial order retention in the ISE, we analyzed the effects of steady-state and changing-state speech on serial order reconstruction of visually presented verbal and spatial items in children (n = 81) and adults (n = 80). In the verbal task, both age groups performed worse with changing-state speech (sequences of different syllables) when compared with steady-state speech (one syllable repeated) and silence. Children were more impaired than adults by both speech sounds. In the spatial task, no disruptive effect of irrelevant speech was found in either group. These results indicate that irrelevant speech evokes similarity-based interference, and thus pose difficulties for the attention-capture and the changing-state account of the ISE.
Data on orienting and habituation to irrelevant sound can distinguish between task-specific and general accounts of auditory distraction: Distractors either disrupt specific cognitive processes ...(e.g., Jones, 1993; Salamé & Baddeley, 1982), or remove more general-purpose attentional resources from any attention-demanding task (e.g., Cowan, 1995). Tested here is the prediction that there is no further auditory distraction effect on immediate serial recall with increments in the number of distractors beyond the "changing-state point" of two discrete distractors. A Bayes factor analysis refutes this nil hypothesis: This prediction, a key element of the strong changing-state hypothesis, is shown to be less likely than two competing alternatives. Quantitative predictions for distraction as a function of the number of distracters are derived for an orienting-response (OR) and a stimulus-mismatch (SMM) hypothesis, representing general and task-specific accounts respectively. The data are shown to be more likely under the SMM hypothesis. Prospects for a parametric account of auditory distraction are considered.
Four experiments tested conflicting predictions about which components of the serial-recall task are most sensitive to auditory distraction. Changing-state (Experiments 1a and 1b) and deviant ...distractor sounds (Experiments 2a and 2b) were presented in one of four different intervals of the serial-recall task: (1) during the first half of encoding, (2) during the second half of encoding, (3) during the first half of retention, or (4) during the second half of retention. According to the embedded-processes model, both types of distractors should interfere with the encoding and rehearsal of targets in the focus of attention. According to the duplex-mechanism account, changing-state distractors should interfere only with rehearsal, whereas deviant distractors should interfere only with encoding. Inconsistent with the latter view, changing-state and deviant distractor sounds interfered with both the encoding and the retention of the targets. Both types of auditory distraction were most pronounced during the second half of encoding when the increasing rehearsal demands had to be coordinated with the continuous updating of the rehearsal set. These findings suggest that the two types of distraction disrupt similar working memory mechanisms.
As multimodal texts profiting from a combination of words and pictures, studying the translation of comic books has not received the due attention, which is why the discipline of Translation Studies ...will always welcome more explorations of comic books. This study examined the employment of Celotti's strategies for translating sound effects from English to Persian, set forth as translation, translation and insertion of a footnote in the gutter, cultural adaptation, leaving untranslated, deletion, and finally, a mix of (some of) the above. In comic books, sound effects are those onomatopoeic expressions that are drawn inside the pictures. Since original Persian comic books are not very common in Iran, translators may not perfectly know how to translate sound effects into Persian. Therefore, Celotti's approach was examined in order to present comic book translators with the most frequent strategies. Seventeen English comics and their Persian translations were carefully studied to discover sound effects and their equivalents; then, Celotti's proposed strategies were applied to the data. As the results presented, there were some strategies in use that the chosen approach did not cover. In addition, source-oriented strategies were adopted in scanlations while target-oriented strategies were found more in published translations.
In a series of experiments, it was tested whether distraction by changing-state irrelevant speech is inevitable or can be modulated by foreknowledge of an imminent to-be-ignored distractor sequence. ...Participants were required to remember visually presented digits while ignoring background speech. In the foreknowledge condition of Experiment 1, the upcoming to-be-ignored sentence was presented auditorily and visually before each trial. With specific foreknowledge, the changing-state irrelevant sound effect (here, increased disruption by sentences compared with repeated words) was significantly attenuated relative to a condition without foreknowledge. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2, in which the information about the upcoming auditory distractor speech was presented only in the visual modality. Experiment 3 showed that only specific foreknowledge of the auditory distractor material has beneficial effects on the ability to ignore distraction. The mere notification that an unspecified distractor sentence would be presented next had no effect on distraction. In Experiment 4, there was only a small and not statistically significant reduction of the irrelevant speech effect when lists of randomly selected words were used as distractor material, suggesting that foreknowledge effects are more pronounced for highly variable, meaningful distractor material. We conclude that the disruption of short-term memory by irrelevant speech is not purely a stimulus-driven process that is immune to top-down control. A significant proportion of the effect can be modulated by specific knowledge about an imminent distractor sequence.
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