Distraction at the cocktail party: Attenuation of the irrelevant speech effect after a training of auditory selective attention.

Abstract

Task-irrelevant auditory stimuli such as speech are known to disrupt the retention of serial information held in verbal short-term memory (STM). Although such effects of irrelevant sound are typically very robust, there is evidence suggesting that some forms of auditory distraction are susceptible to cognitive control or auditory attention. In the present study, we tested whether an extensive training of auditory selective attention reduces the degree of interference produced by irrelevant speech in a serial STM task. Participants (n = 38) were trained on an adaptive dichotic-listening task requiring selective processing of a varying list of verbal items presented via headphones while ignoring auditory distractors presented simultaneously either by a different voice or in the irrelevant ear. The number of target items that could be memorized increased throughout 5 training sessions, suggesting improvement of auditory selective attention in a dichotic-listening situation. An active control group (n = 37) was trained on an auditory duration discrimination task for 5 sessions. Prior to the training, task-irrelevant speech was shown to interfere with serial recall in both groups. After the training, however, the irrelevant speech effect was attenuated in the group that was trained on the dichotic-listening task, whereas no reduction of auditory distraction was observed in the active control group. The results show that the interference produced by task-irrelevant speech can be reduced through an extensive dichotic-listening training, suggesting that the irrelevant speech effect is susceptible to auditory selective attention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).