The Relative and Perceived Impact of Irrelevant Speech,Vocal Music and Non-vocal Music on Working Memory

The ability to retain and manipulate information for brief periods of time is crucial for proficient cognitive functioning but working memory (WM) is susceptible to disruption by irrelevant speech. Music may also be detrimental, but its impact on WM is not clear. This study assessed the effects of vocal music, equivalent instrumental music, and irrelevant speech on WM in order to clarify what aspect of music affects performance and the degree of impairment. To study this, 60 college students completed WM tests (digit span) in the presence of irrelevant speech, vocal music, instrumental (karaoke) versions of the vocal music, and silence. As expected, both speech and vocal music degraded performance. WM performance with instrumental music was better than with vocal music but not significantly different from either silence or speech. Familiarity with song lyrics had little effect on performance. People were poor judges of the degree of memory impairment resulting from various irrelevant sounds. This study was reviewed and approved by the Clemson University Institutional Review Board.     

Can the irrelevant speech effect turn into a stimulus suffix effect?

The irrelevant sound effect (ISE) and the stimulus suffix effect (SSE) are two qualitatively different phenomena, although in both paradigms irrelevant auditory material is played while a verbal serial recall task is being performed. Jones, Macken, and Nicholls (2004) Jones, D. M., Macken, W. J. and Nicholls, A. P. 2004. The phonological store of working memory: Is it phonological and is it a store?. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30: 656–674. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] have proposed the effect of irrelevant speech on auditory serial recall to switch from an ISE to an SSE mechanism, if the auditory-perceptive similarity of relevant and irrelevant material is maximized. The experiment reported here (n = 36) tested this hypothesis by exploring auditory serial recall performance both under irrelevant speech and under speech suffix conditions. These speech materials were spoken either by the same voice as the auditory items to be recalled or by a different voice. The experimental conditions were such that the likelihood of obtaining an SSE was maximized. The results, however, show that irrelevant speech—in contrast to speech suffixes—affects auditory serial recall independently of its perceptive similarity to the items to be recalled and thus in terms of an ISE mechanism that crucially extends to recency. The ISE thus cannot turn into an SSE.     

Can the irrelevant speech effect turn into a stimulus suffix effect?

The irrelevant sound effect (ISE) and the stimulus suffix effect (SSE) are two qualitatively different phenomena, although in both paradigms irrelevant auditory material is played while a verbal serial recall task is being performed. Jones, Macken, and Nicholls (2004) have proposed the effect of irrelevant speech on auditory serial recall to switch from an ISE to an SSE mechanism, if the auditory-perceptive similarity of relevant and irrelevant material is maximized. The experiment reported here (n = 36) tested this hypothesis by exploring auditory serial recall performance both under irrelevant speech and under speech suffix conditions. These speech materials were spoken either by the same voice as the auditory items to be recalled or by a different voice. The experimental conditions were such that the likelihood of obtaining an SSE was maximized. The results, however, show that irrelevant speech—in contrast to speech suffixes—affects auditory serial recall independently of its perceptive similarity to the items to be recalled and thus in terms of an ISE mechanism that crucially extends to recency. The ISE thus cannot turn into an SSE.     

Self-relevance increases the irrelevant sound effect: Attentional disruption by one's own name

Memory performance is severely disrupted when task-irrelevant sound is played during item presentation or in a retention interval. Working memory models make contrasting assumptions on whether the semantic content of the auditory distractors modulates the irrelevant sound effect. In the present study, participants made more errors in serial recall when they had to ignore sentences containing their own name as opposed to that of a yoked-control partner. These results are only consistent with working memory models that allow for attentional processes to play a role in the explanation of the irrelevant sound effect. With repeated presentation the disruptive effect of one's own name decreased, whereas the disruptive effect of the auditory distractors in the control condition remained constant. The latter finding is most consistent with the duplex model of auditory attention, which assumes that the irrelevant sound effect is primarily caused by automatic interference of acoustic distractor features, but at the same time allows for a disruption of encoding due to attentional capture by unexpected deviants. However, to explain the present results, the mechanism responsible for the attentional capture has to be extended to highly (self-)relevant auditory distractors.     

Disruption of short-term memory by distractor speech: Does content matter?

Four experiments replicate the finding that auditory distractors that are lexically identical to the visual target items dramatically increase the irrelevant-speech effect on serial recall. This effect was previously attributed to interference of incompatible order cues. The present results suggest that a different interpretation of this effect is required. Experiment 2 replicates the order congruence effect observed by Hughes and Jones (2005), but shows that this effect is most likely due to an attenuation of interference that is caused by strategic attention shifts to the nominally irrelevant material. Experiments 3 and 4 show that the between-stream similarity effect generalizes to a condition in which the distractor items were drawn from the same category as the targets, but were not identical to them. By showing that nonacoustic distractor features can increase interference in serial recall of lists of supposedly “meaningless” items such as digits or consonants, the results are most consistent with models that postulate an integration of short-term and long-term memory such as the embedded-processes model and the feature model and are inconsistent with classical structural accounts of memory.     

The irrelevant sound effect in short-term memory: Is there developmental change?

With two experiments, effects of irrelevant speech and classroom noise on serial recall of common nouns presented pictorially were investigated in children and adults. Experiment 1 used fixed list lengths for children (first graders) and adults. Experiment 2 used list lengths adjusted to participants' (second–third graders, adults) individual spans. In both experiments, children and adults were equally impaired by irrelevant speech. This contrasts with a related study (differences in methodology) by Elliott (2002), who reported severe increase in the detrimental impact of irrelevant speech with decreasing age. In both experiments, classroom noise had no effect in overall analyses. For Experiment 1, however, separate group analyses revealed impairment in children. Results suggest that effects of irrelevant sounds on serial recall stem from two separate mechanisms: Specific interference due to the sounds' automatic access to short-term memory, and/or attention capture. Only for the latter there is developmental change.     

Irrelevant speech effects and statistical learning

Immediate serial recall of visually presented verbal stimuli is impaired by the presence of irrelevant auditory background speech, the so-called irrelevant speech effect. Two of the three main accounts of this effect place restrictions on when it will be observed, limiting its occurrence either to items processed by the phonological loop (the phonological loop hypothesis) or to items that are not too dissimilar from the irrelevant speech (the feature model). A third, the object-oriented episodic record (O-OER) model, requires only that the memory task involves seriation. The present studies test these three accounts by examining whether irrelevant auditory speech will interfere with a task that does not involve the phonological loop, does not use stimuli that are compatible with those to be remembered, but does require seriation. Two experiments found that irrelevant speech led to lower levels of performance in a visual statistical learning task, offering more support for the O-OER model and posing a challenge for the other two accounts.     

Irrelevant speech does not interfere with serial recall in early blind listeners

Phonological working memory is known be (a) inversely related to the duration of the items to be learned (word-length effect), and (b) impaired by the presence of irrelevant speech-like sounds (irrelevant-speech effect). As it is discussed controversially whether these memory disruptions are subject to attentional control, both effects were studied in sighted participants and in a sample of early blind individuals who are expected to be superior in selectively attending to auditory stimuli. Results show that, while performance depended on word length in both groups, irrelevant speech interfered with recall only in the sighted group, but not in blind participants. This suggests that blind listeners may be able to effectively prevent irrelevant sound from being encoded in the phonological store, presumably due to superior auditory processing. The occurrence of a word-length effect, however, implies that blind and sighted listeners are utilizing the same phonological rehearsal mechanism in order to maintain information in the phonological store.     

Modalities of memory: Is reading lips like hearing voices?

Functional similarities in verbal memory performance across presentation modalities (written, heard, lipread) are often taken to point to a common underlying representational form upon which the modalities converge. We show here instead that the pattern of performance depends critically on presentation modality and different mechanisms give rise to superficially similar effects across modalities. Lipread recency is underpinned by different mechanisms to auditory recency, and while the effect of an auditory suffix on an auditory list is due to the perceptual grouping of the suffix with the list, the corresponding effect with lipread speech is due to misidentification of the lexical content of the lipread suffix. Further, while a lipread suffix does not disrupt auditory recency, an auditory suffix does disrupt recency for lipread lists. However, this effect is due to attentional capture ensuing from the presentation of an unexpected auditory event, and is evident both with verbal and nonverbal auditory suffixes. These findings add to a growing body of evidence that short-term verbal memory performance is determined by modality-specific perceptual and motor processes, rather than by the storage and manipulation of phonological representations.     

The attentional cost of inattentional blindness

When our attention is engaged in a visual task, we can be blind to events which would otherwise not be missed. In three experiments, 97 out of the 165 observers performing a visual attention task failed to notice an unexpected, irrelevant object moving across the display. Surprisingly, this object significantly lowered accuracy in the primary task when, and only when, it failed to reach awareness. We suggest that an unexpected stimulus causes a state of alert that would normally generate an attentional shift; if this response is prevented by an attention-consuming task, a portion of the attentional resources remains allocated to the object. Such a portion is large enough to disturb performance, but not so large that the object can be recognized as task-irrelevant and accordingly ignored. Our findings have one counterintuitive implication: irrelevant stimuli might hamper some types of performance only when perceived subliminally.     

无关声音效应研究述评

无关声音效应是在对注意与记忆进行研究时所发现的一个现象,有益于探讨噪音等无关声音刺激对个体认知过程、工作绩效及身心健康的影响作用。在简要回顾ISE现象的界定与理论解释争论的基础上,重点从对刺激强度不同的ISE现象之理论分析、应用价值及一些相关的近期研究方面作了介绍,从对ISE现象的理论解释、无关声音刺激的选取、研究方法的综合使用、ISE现象中的个体差异等方面做了展望。     

The development and robustness of young children’s understanding of aspectuality

We investigated whether 6-year-olds’ understanding of perceptual aspectuality was sufficiently robust to deal with the presence of irrelevant information. A total of 32 children chose whether to look or feel to locate a specific object (identifiable by sight or touch) from four objects that were hidden. In half of the trials, the objects were different on only one modality (e.g., four objects that felt different but were the same color). In the remainder of the trials, the objects also differed (partially) on one irrelevant modality (e.g., four objects that felt different, two red and two blue, where the goal was to locate the soft object). Performance was worse on the latter trials. We discuss children’s difficulty in dealing with irrelevant information.     

Facial expressions modulate the gaze orienting effect on sound localization judgement

Recent studies have shown that cueing eye gaze can affect the processing of visual information, and this phenomenon is called the gaze-orienting effect (visual-GOE). Emerging evidence has shown that the cueing eye gaze also affects the processing of auditory information (auditory-GOE). However, it is unclear whether the auditory-GOE is modulated by emotion. We conducted three behavioural experiments to investigate whether cueing eye gaze influenced the orientation judgement to a sound, and whether the effect was modulated by facial expressions. The current study set four facial expressions (angry, fearful, happy, and neutral), manipulated the display type of facial expressions, and changed the sequence of gaze and emotional expressions. Participants were required to judge the sound orientation after facial expressions and gaze cues. The results showed that the orientation judgement of sound was influenced by gaze direction in all three experiments, and the orientation judgement of sound was faster when the face was oriented to the target location (congruent trials) than when the face was oriented away from the target location (incongruent trials). The modulation of emotion on auditory-GOE was observed only when gaze shifted followed by facial expression (Exp3); the auditory-GOE was significantly greater for angry faces than for neutral faces. These findings indicate that auditory-GOE as a social phenomenon exists widely, and the effect was modulated by facial expression. Gaze shift before the presentation of emotion was the key influencing factor for the emotional modulation in an auditory target gaze-orienting task. Our findings suggest that the integration of facial expressions and eye gaze was context-dependent.     

语音象征的产生机制：基于敏感期的先天后天作用模型

Bouba-Kiki效应(简称BK效应)指语音和形状特征之间的映射关系。针对BK效应的产生机制,先天论和后天论之间争论激烈。先天论的观点认为人们对语音象征的敏感性是出生时便存在的一种语言机制。而后天论的观点则强调语音象征是语言经验的产物。上述理论均获得大量研究证据的支持,且均无法完全否定对方。这表明,上述理论可能均未完整揭示语音象征的产生机制。鉴于此,针对BK效应的产生机制,梳理先天论与后天论的支持证据,并率先提出语言相关的BK效应敏感期假设。同时,梳理了支持BK效应敏感期的初步研究证据及可能的影响因素。进而,以语言相关的BK效应敏感期假设为基础,提出语音象征产生的先天后天相互作用模型,以整合以往研究中的矛盾。最后,展望了语音象征的未来研究进展和方向。     

不同背景噪音干扰下的数字短时记忆研究

以三种类型(交通噪音、生活噪音、舒缓乐音)三种声级(40.7dBA、56.4dBA、73.3dBA)的环境噪音作为无关声音刺激,考察其对数字短时记忆广度和Sternberg任务的影响,发现:(1)背景噪音的不同对个体数字短时记忆广度影响没有显著差异;(2)背景噪音声级的不同对个体删除极端数值后正确反应的反应时及对“极错总比率”都有显著的影响;(3)对于删除极端数值后的正确反应来说,在不同背景噪音存在下,随着记忆集的增大,反应时仍然呈直线上升趋势。