Attentional control and metacognitive monitoring of the effects of different types of task-irrelevant sound on serial recall.

Abstract

The presence of task-irrelevant sound disrupts short-term memory for serial information. Recent studies found that enhanced perceptual task-encoding load (static visual noise added to target items) reduces the disruptive effect of an auditory deviant but does not affect the task-specific interference by changing-state sound, indicating that the deviation effect may be more susceptible to attentional control. This study aimed to further specify the role of attentional control in shielding against different types of auditory distraction, examining speech and nonspeech distractors presented in laboratory and Web based experiments. To further elucidate the role of controlled processes, we tested whether the detrimental effects of distractor sounds-and their modulation by attentional control-reach participants' awareness. We found that changing-state sound and auditory deviants in steady-state sound equally affected both objective recall performance and metacognitive confidence judgments but did not affect the accuracy of confidence judgments. Most importantly, across four experiments, an increase of task load (visual degradation of the to-be-remembered items) did not reduce either type of auditory distraction. A close replication of the original modulation of the deviation effect by perceptual task load (in an online environment) even revealed a stronger deviation effect at high task load, suggesting that the manipulation may have influenced cognitive load and the ability to control distractor interference in memory. In line with a unitary account of auditory distraction, the results suggest that although both types of distraction reach metacognitive awareness, they may be equally unrelated to perceptual load and the availability of attentional resources. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).