Abstract
Effects of auditory distraction by task-irrelevant background speech on the immediate serial recall of verbal material are well established. Less is known about the influence of background speech on memory for visual configural information. A recent study demonstrated that face learning is disrupted by joyful music relative to soothing violin music and quiet. This pattern is parallel to findings in the serial-recall paradigm showing that auditory distraction is primarily caused by auditory changes. Here we connect these two streams of research by testing whether face learning is impaired by irrelevant speech. Participants learned faces either in quiet or while ignoring auditory changing-state sequences (sentential speech) or steady-state sequences (word repetitions). Face recognition was impaired by irrelevant speech relative to quiet. Furthermore, changing-state speech disrupted performance more than steady-state speech. The results were replicated in a second study using reversed speech, suggesting that the disruptive potential of the background speech does not depend on its semantic content. These findings thus demonstrate robust effects of auditory distraction on face learning. Theoretical explanations and applied implications are discussed.
Highlights
People usually prefer a quiet environment to study because they are concerned that learning may be impaired by background sounds
According to the changing-state explanation, the increased distraction caused by sentential speech in comparison to word repetitions is primarily due to auditory changes in the distractor material
There was a significant changing-state effect in that sentential speech disrupted face learning more than the repeated presentation of the same auditory distractor word
Summary
People usually prefer a quiet environment to study because they are concerned that learning may be impaired by background sounds. We test whether the disruptive effects of background speech generalize to face learning. This is relevant for the evaluation of theories about auditory distraction and for applied contexts such as eyewitness testimonies[6,7]. One of the key signatures of auditory distraction is the changing-state effect, which refers to the observation that auditory distractor sequences that contain many different auditory objects (such as words or tones) disrupt cognitive performance more than continuous or repetitive sounds[9,13,14]. While the effect of task-irrelevant sounds on working-memory processes is comparatively well understood, less is known about how auditory distractors affect the processing of complex visual stimuli (cf.[33]). In forensic settings, for instance, it is important to know whether the identification of a perpetrator face is affected by background noise[6,7]
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