Process-Sensitivity of the Changing-State Effect – Three Methodological Issues Regarding the Current Evidence Base

ABSTRACT

The finding that irrelevant sound that changes from one token to the next disrupts serial recall performance more strongly than steady-state sound is well established as the changing-state-effect in the auditory distraction literature. Two of the dominant accounts of irrelevant sound effects differ in whether they expect the changing-state effect to be process-sensitive. According to the duplex-mechanism account, changing-state effects are restricted to tasks in which participants process order information. According to an attentional capture account, they should occur independent of the role of order information. In this review, we give an overview of studies investigating the process-sensitivity of the changing-state effect and discuss three methodological issues with the current evidence base and how they have already been addressed in some studies. One issue concerns the difficulties arising from comparing tasks that are supposed to differ only in the necessity to retain order information, but that may also differ in other aspects. A second issue concerns the need to consider what participants actually do when performing a task rather than to rely solely on task analyses. The final issue concerns the pitfalls associated with testing for null effects. Based on these considerations, we conclude that the question of process-sensitivity is far from settled and make suggestions for how to minimize these problems in future research.

KEYWORDS:

• Irrelevant sound effect
• attentional capture
• duplex-mechanism
• interference-by-process
• process-sensitivity
• task specificity
• strategies

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In some studies, other item sets and list lengths are applied, such as the letters “F K L M R S T” (Dorsi et al., 2018), the months of the year (Hadlington et al., 2006) or a list of religious buildings learned within the experiment (Beaman & Jones, 1997).

2. Given the importance for the theoretical implications, we will report for any study we describe when there is only a silent control conditions.

3. Note that, while this data pattern seems to contradict the duplex-mechanism account, Henson et al. (2003, p. 1316) suggested that their findings could be accounted for by assuming “that irrelevant sound has more than one interfering effect: a general distraction of attention, which affects both the IP and LP tasks, and a specific disruption of serial ordering, which affects only the LP task”.

4. With regard to different research questions, one of the current authors is no exception to this procedure (Schweppe et al., 2011).

5. Note that it is not necessary that one of the compared hypotheses is a null hypothesis, just that two meaningful hypotheses are contrasted. Nonetheless, we explicate the procedure for the comparison of the null hypothesis and an alternative hypothesis because this is the comparison of interest here.