Abstract
Task-irrelevant speech or music sounds are known to disrupt verbal short-term memory even when participants are instructed to ignore the sound, suggesting that automatically processed acoustical changes interfere with the rehearsal of phonological items. However, much less is known about auditory distraction in tasks that require the memorization and recall of non-phonological auditory items. In the present study, both musically trained and untrained participants were asked to memorize random tone sequences (consisting of low, medium, and high pitch tones) while task-irrelevant sound was presented. Irrelevant instrumental music was found to produce more disruption of tonal recall than white noise, whereas irrelevant speech produced intermediate levels of disruption. In contrast, only speech produced significant interference in an analogous verbal recall task. Crucially, although musically trained participants were able to recall more tones in general, the degree of auditory distraction that was produced by irrelevant music in the tonal recall task was found to be independent of musical expertise. The findings are in line with the assumption of two separate mechanisms for the maintenance of tonal and phonological information. Specifically, short-term memory for tone sequences may rely on a pitch-based rehearsal system which is disrupted by the perception of irrelevant pitch changes as contained in instrumental music (and to a lesser extent in speech), whereas serial recall of verbal items is most sensitive to phonological sounds.
Highlights
According to the most prominent working memory model (Baddeley and Hitch, 1974; Baddeley, 1992, 2003), temporary storage of verbal information is based on subvocal articulatory rehearsal in a phonological loop which is supposed to operate independently from the mechanisms used for storage of visual and spatial information
The irrelevant sound effect was qualified by a significant sound × task interaction, F(2,96) = 5.08; p = 0.008; ηG2 = 0.01, indicating that— across all participants—speech was most distracting in the verbal recall task (Mspeech = 0.738; SDspeech = 0.122 for speech vs. Mnoise = 0.761; SDnoise = 0.124 and Mmusic = 0.746; SDmusic = 0.125), whereas music was most distracting in the tonal recall task (Mmusic = 0.659; SDmusic = 0.166 vs. Mnoise = 0.733; SDnoise = 0.165 and Mspeech = 0.697; SDspeech = 0.161)
We found that irrelevant music interfered with the serial recall of tone sequences in both musically trained and untrained participants, as compared to both background speech and noise
Summary
According to the most prominent working memory model (Baddeley and Hitch, 1974; Baddeley, 1992, 2003), temporary storage of verbal information is based on subvocal articulatory rehearsal in a phonological loop which is supposed to operate independently from the mechanisms used for storage of visual and spatial information. If irrelevant speech gained direct access to the phonological store when the articulatory loop is occupied, the phonological similarity effect on serial recall of auditory items (in contrast to visual items) should persist under conditions of articulatory suppression (e.g., Murray, 1968; Baddeley et al, 1984) In this case, the presence of a suffix (a redundant item after presentation of the to-be-remembered list) was found to be sufficient to eliminate the phonological similarity effect with auditory items under articulatory suppression, indicating that the effect may have been driven by perceptual processes rather than by phonological rehearsal (Jones et al, 2004)
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