Abstract
Irrelevant sounds can be very distracting, especially when trying to recall information according to its serial order. The irrelevant sound effect (ISE) has been studied in the literature for more than 40 years, yet many questions remain. One goal that has received little attention involves the discernment of a predictive factor, or individual difference characteristic, that would help to determine the size of the ISE. The current experiments were designed to replicate and extend prior work by Macken, Phelps, and Jones (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16, 139–144, 2009), who demonstrated a significant predictive relationship between the size of the ISE and a type of auditory processing called global pattern matching. The authors also found a relationship between auditory processing involving deliberate recoding of sounds and serial order recall performance in silence. Across two experiments, this dissociation was not replicated. Additionally, the two types of auditory processing were not significantly correlated with each other. The lack of a clear pattern of findings replicating the Macken et al. (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16, 139–144, 2009) study raises several questions regarding the need for future research on the characteristics of these auditory processing tasks, and the stability of the measurement of the ISE itself.
Highlights
Irrelevant sounds can be very distracting, especially when trying to recall information according to its serial order
As no participants scored 90% or higher in the global pattern-matching condition, we were not concerned about ceiling effects, as discussed in Macken et al Descriptive statistics and correlational analyses for the three working memory capacity (WMC) measures are presented in the Appendix, and Tables 1 and 2 present the descriptive statistics and correlations for all measures, including the WMC composite score
As noted in prior work by Elliott and Cowan (2005), there was a significant correlation between the irrelevant sound effect (ISE) difference score and digit span
Summary
Irrelevant sounds can be very distracting, especially when trying to recall information according to its serial order. The current experiments were designed to replicate and extend prior work by Macken, Phelps, and Jones (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16, 139–144, 2009), who demonstrated a significant predictive relationship between the size of the ISE and a type of auditory processing called global pattern matching. The authors found a relationship between auditory processing involving deliberate recoding of sounds and serial order recall performance in silence. Across two experiments, this dissociation was not replicated. On “different” trials, one of the notes was displaced upwards or downwards compared with its relative position in the first set This type of processing required the participant to engage in deliberate recoding, to be able to determine if the overall melody was the same or different, given that the entire comparison sequence was shifted in frequency
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