The role of working memory in auditory selective attention

Abstract

A growing body of research now demonstrates that working memory plays an important role in controlling the extent to which irrelevant visual distractors are processed during visual selective attention tasks (e.g., Lavie, Hirst, De Fockert, & Viding, 2004). Recently, it has been shown that the successful selection of tactile information also depends on the availability of working memory (Dalton, Lavie, & Spence, 2009). Here, we investigate whether working memory plays a role in auditory selective attention. Participants focused their attention on short continuous bursts of white noise (targets) while attempting to ignore pulsed bursts of noise (distractors). Distractor interference in this auditory task, as measured in terms of the difference in performance between congruent and incongruent distractor trials, increased significantly under high (vs. low) load in a concurrent working-memory task. These results provide the first evidence demonstrating a causal role for working memory in reducing interference by irrelevant auditory distractors.

Keywords:

• Auditory attention
• Working memory
• Selective attention
• Load theory

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a Junior Research Fellowship to P.D. from St Anne's College, Oxford, UK.

Notes

¹ We acknowledge that the low load task of remembering digits in numerical order is likely to have imposed minimal demands on WM. This allowed us to achieve a strong manipulation of the availability of WM, in contrasting this low load task against the very demanding high load task. While it might be possible to argue that the low WM load task in fact imposes no WM load, we prefer to label the task “low load” in order to reflect the fact that task sharing and response requirements were fully matched across both working-memory tasks.

² Although we have termed the two groups “high” and “low” accuracy for ease of description, note that the “low accuracy” group actually performed at close to 90% correct.