•Previous studies on auditory distraction in children and adults yielded mixed results.•The auditory deviant effect has not been tested yet from a developmental perspective.•Third, fourth, and fifth ...graders were compared to younger adults and older adults.•We used both fixed and individual list lengths to equate difficulty across age groups.•Children and adults showed equivalent auditory deviant and changing state effects.
There is an ongoing debate about whether children have more problems ignoring auditory distractors than adults. This is an important empirical question with direct implications for theories making predictions about the development of selective attention. In two experiments, the disruptive effect of to-be-ignored speech on short-term memory performance of third graders, fourth graders, fifth graders, younger adults, and older adults was examined. Three auditory conditions were compared: (a) steady state sequences in which the same distractor was repeated, (b) changing state sequences in which different distractors were presented, and (c) auditory deviant sequences in which a deviant distractor was presented in a sequence of repeated distractors. According to the attentional resource view, children should exhibit larger disruption by changing and deviant sounds due to their poorer attentional control abilities compared with adults. The duplex-mechanism account proposes that the auditory deviant effect is under attentional control, whereas the changing state effect is not, and thus predicts that children should be more susceptible to auditory deviants than adults but equally disrupted by changing state sequences. According to the renewed view of age-related distraction, there should be no age differences in cross-modal auditory distraction because some of the irrelevant auditory information can be filtered out early in the processing stream. Children and adults were equally disrupted by changing and deviant speech sounds regardless of whether task difficulty was equated between age groups or not. These results are consistent with the renewed view of age-related distraction.
Numerous studies have shown that task-irrelevant background speech impairs performance of verbal short-term memory. This well-established effect is related to practice in open-plan offices, where ...employees are potentially disturbed by the speech of their colleagues. One option to reduce the disruptive effect is by masking the speech, for example, using random noise. Based on past research by Jones and Macken (1995), the ISO Standard 3382-3 (2012) assumes that multiple background speakers in open-plan offices may mask each other in a natural way, consequently reducing the disruptive effect of speech. The aim of this study was to check this assumption using a realistic acoustical simulation of an open-plan office situation. A combination of a nearby speaker and a varying number of background speakers was played to 26 participants while they performed on a verbal short-term memory task. Additionally, the intelligibility of the presented speaker sentences, levels of annoyance, and workload were checked. The results show a significant trend towards an improvement of short-term memory performance when the number of babble voices grows from one to six. However, performance levels are far from those reached under silent conditions. Moreover, annoyance and measures of subjective workload did not diminish due to babble masking.
The irrelevant sound effect (ISE) describes the disruption
of processes involved in maintaining information in working memory (WM) when
irrelevant noise is present in the environment. While some ...posit that the ISE
arises due to split obligation of attention to the irrelevant sound and the
to-be-remembered information, others have argued that background noise corrupts
the order of information within WM. Support for the latter position comes from
research showing that the ISE appears to be most robust in tasks that emphasize
ordered maintenance by a serial rehearsal strategy, and diminished when
rehearsal is discouraged or precluded by task characteristics. This prior work
confounds the demand for seriation with rehearsal. Thus, the present study aims
to disentangle ordered maintenance from a rehearsal strategy by using a running
memory span task that requires ordered output but obviates the utility of
rehearsal. Across four experiments, we find a significant ISE that persists
under conditions that should discourage the use of rehearsal and among
individuals who self-report use of alternative strategies. These findings
indicate that rehearsal is not necessary to produce an ISE in a serial recall
task and thus fail to corroborate accounts of the ISE that emphasize the
involvement of rehearsal.
Sequences of auditory objects such as one-syllable words or brief sounds disrupt serial recall of visually presented targets even when the auditory objects are completely irrelevant for the task at ...hand. The token set size effect is a label for the claim that disruption increases only when moving from a 1-token distractor sequence (e.g., "AAAAAAAA") to a token set size of 2 (e.g., "ABABABAB") but remains constant when moving from a token set size of 2 to a larger token set size (e.g., "ABCABCAB" or "DAGCFBEH"). Here we show that this claim was incorrect and based on experiments with insufficient statistical power. With sufficient statistical power it can be shown that disruption increases not only when the distractor token set size increases from 1 to 2, but also when it increases from two to eight one-syllable words (Experiment 1) and brief instrumental sounds (Experiment 2). These findings have implications for theories of auditory distraction which differ in their predictions about whether the distractor-induced performance decrement should (a) only be determined by acoustic differences between immediately adjacent distractor tokens (duplex-mechanism account) or (b) gradually increase as a function of the variability in the distractor set (attentional account). The present data are inconsistent with the duplex-mechanism account and support the attentional account.
Introduction
The ability to resolve interference declines with age and is attributed to neurodegeneration and reduced cognitive function and mental alertness in older adults. Our previous study ...revealed that task-irrelevant but environmentally meaningful sounds improve performance on the modified Simon task in older adults. However, little is known about neural correlates of this sound facilitation effect.
Methods
Twenty right-handed older adults mean age = 72 (SD = 4), 11 female participated in the fMRI study. They performed the modified Simon task in which the arrows were presented either in the locations matching the arrow direction (congruent trials) or in the locations mismatching the arrow direction (incongruent trials). A total of 50% of all trials were accompanied by task-irrelevant but environmentally meaningful sounds.
Results
Participants were faster on the trials with concurrent sounds, independently of whether trials were congruent or incongruent. The sound effect was associated with activation in the distributed network of auditory, posterior parietal, frontal, and limbic brain regions. The magnitude of the behavioral facilitation effect due to sound was associated with the changes in activation of the bilateral auditory cortex, cuneal cortex, and occipital fusiform gyrus, precuneus, left superior parietal lobule (SPL) for No Sound vs. Sound trials. These changes were associated with the corresponding changes in reaction time (RT). Older adults with a recent history of falls showed greater activation in the left SPL than those without falls history.
Conclusion
Our findings are consistent with the dedifferentiation hypothesis of cognitive aging. The facilitatory effect of sound could be achieved through recruitment of excessive neural resources, which allows older adults to increase attention and mental alertness during task performance. Considering that the SPL is critical for integration of multisensory information, individuals with slower task responses and those with a history of falls may need to recruit this region more actively than individuals with faster responses and those without a fall history to overcome increased difficulty with interference resolution. Future studies should examine the relationship among activation in the SPL, the effect of sound, and falls history in the individuals who are at heightened risk of falls.
•Studied vulnerability of verbal STM to auditory distraction in adults and children.•Rehearsal underpins some distraction regardless of developmental stage.•Poor attentional control also plays a ...substantial role in children’s distractibility.•Results support duplex- over unitary-mechanism accounts of auditory distraction.
The contribution of two mechanisms of auditory distraction in verbal serial short-term memory—interference with the serial rehearsal processes used to support short-term recall and general attentional diversion—was investigated by exploiting differences in auditory distraction in children and adults. Experiment 1 showed that serial rehearsal plays a role in children’s as well as adults’ distractibility: Auditory distraction from irrelevant speech was greater for both children and adults as the burden on rehearsal increased. This pattern was particularly pronounced in children, suggesting that underdeveloped rehearsal skill in this population may increase their distractibility. Experiment 2 showed that both groups were more susceptible to changing- than steady-state speech when the task involved serial rehearsal—indicating that both groups suffer interference-by-process—but that children, but not adults, were also susceptible to any sort of sound (steady or changing) in a task thought to be devoid of serial rehearsal. The overall pattern of results suggests that children’s increased susceptibility to auditory distraction during verbal short-term memory performance is due to a greater susceptibility to attentional diversion; in this view, under-developed rehearsal-skill increases children’s distractibility by exacerbating their under-developed attentional control rather than by increasing interference-by-process.
Working memory theories make opposing predictions as to whether the disruptive effect of task-irrelevant sound on serial recall should be attenuated after repeated exposure to the auditory ...distractors. Although evidence of habituation has emerged after a passive listening phase, previous attempts to observe habituation to to-be ignored distractors on a trial-by-trial basis have proven to be fruitless. With the present study, we suggest that habituation to auditory distractors occurs, but has often been overlooked because past attempts to measure habituation in the irrelevant-sound paradigm were not sensitive enough. In a series of four experiments, the disruptive effects of to-be-ignored speech and music relative to a quiet control condition were markedly reduced after eight repetitions, regardless of whether trials were presented in blocks (Exp.
1
) or in a random order (Exp.
2
). The auditory distractor’s playback direction (forward, backward) had no effect (Exp.
3
). The same results were obtained when the auditory distractors were only presented in a retention interval after the presentation of the to-be-remembered items (Exp.
4
). This pattern is only consistent with theoretical accounts that allow for attentional processes to interfere with the maintenance of information in working memory.
The Irrelevant Sound Effect (ISE) is the finding that background sound impairs accuracy for visually presented serial recall tasks. Among various auditory backgrounds, speech typically acts as the ...strongest distractor. Based on the changing-state hypothesis, speech is a disruptive background because it is more complex than other nonspeech backgrounds. In the current study, we evaluate an alternative explanation by examining whether the speech-likeness of the background (speech fidelity) contributes, beyond signal complexity, to the ISE. We did this by using noise-vocoded speech as a background. In Experiment 1, we varied the complexity of the background by manipulating the number of vocoding channels. Results indicate that the ISE increases with the number of channels, suggesting that more complex signals produce greater ISEs. In Experiment 2, we varied complexity and speech fidelity independently. At each channel level, we selectively reversed a subset of channels to design a low-fidelity signal that was equated in overall complexity. Experiment 2 results indicated that speech-like noise-vocoded speech produces a larger ISE than selectively reversed noise-vocoded speech. Finally, in Experiment 3, we evaluated the locus of the speech-fidelity effect by assessing the distraction produced by these stimuli in a missing-item task. In this task, even though noise-vocoded speech disrupted task performance relative to silence, neither its complexity nor speech fidelity contributed to this effect. Together, these findings indicate a clear role for speech fidelity of the background beyond its changing-state quality and its attention capture potential.
Sounds of the kind called “Atmospheric Sound” in the field of video sound effects are also used to express the feelings and circumstances of characters. Although these are not sounds or sound effects ...of middle range which can not be called sound expression, there is no specific concept in the production technique, and systematic investigation classification etc has not been done about production method. In this research, we mainly focused on Japanese SF animation, and conducted a survey of 12 titles and 83scenes, mainly on contents since the 00's. As a result, the relation with the various editing techniques is deep as the video expression technique, and sound including abundant dissonance and non-integral next harmonic was abundantly used as the sound production technique. Furthermore, when compared with overseas contents, the use rate of electronic sound was remarkably high.
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