Decomposing the Role of Rehearsal in Auditory Distraction during Serial Recall

ABSTRACT

According to the interference-by-process mechanism of auditory distraction, irrelevant changing sounds interfere with subvocal articulatory-motor sequencing during rehearsal. However, previous attempts to limit rehearsal with concurrent articulation and examine the residual irrelevant sound effect have limited both cumulative rehearsal as well as the initial assembly of articulatory-phonological labels. The current research decomposed rehearsal into these two levels of articulatory-phonological sequencing: silent concurrent articulation limits the availability of both serial repetition and articulatory-phonological recoding; rapid serial visual presentation allows for articulatory-phonological recoding but presents items too quickly for cumulative serial repetition. As predicted by the interference-by-process account, concurrent articulation – but not rapid serial visual presentation – reduced the irrelevant sound effect. Not only did the irrelevant sound effect persist in the face of rapid serial visual presentation, a steady-state effect also emerged. These findings indicate that irrelevant sounds interfere with both serial processing of articulatory-motor planning at the word level as well as in the formation of item-to-item associations created via serial repetition of complete items. Moreover, these findings highlight the benefits of articulatory-phonological recoding – independent of pure rehearsal – within serial recall.

KEYWORDS:

• Irrelevant sound effect
• rehearsal
• attention
• concurrent articulation
• articulatory suppression

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Rebecca Wagner for assistance with data management.

Disclosure Statement

The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose. These data were also presented at Psychonomic Society’s 57th Annual Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, November, 2016.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Open Science Framework (OSF) at https://osf.io/fdqbv.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. For the purposes of the current paper, the term “ISE” will be used to refer specifically to the comparison of serial recall performance in the presence of a changing-state sound, relative to serial recall performance in silence; however, it is important to note that the irrelevant sound stimuli may vary across studies (e.g., such as using a non-speech sound like a tone changing pitch; Jones & Macken, 1993).

2. Corresponding frequentist tests were consistent with the Bayesian ones. Frequentist models returned significant p-values for factors and interactions included in winning models in the Bayesian analysis and null p-values when the null model was favored.

3. We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for critical input on developing this argument.

Additional information

Funding

AA’s contribution to this research was supported, in part, by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under award number [P20 GM109023].