Registered Replication Report: Testing Disruptive Effects of Irrelevant Speech on Visual-Spatial Working Memory

Tatiana Kvetnaya

doi:10.5334/jeps.450

Abstract

A Partial Replication of “Functional Equivalence of Verbal and Spatial Information in Serial Short-Term Memory (Jones, Farrand, Stuart, & Morris, 1995; Experiment 4)” The irrelevant speech effect (ISE)—the phenomenon that background speech impairs serial recall of visually presented material—has been widely used for examining the structure of short-term memory. In Experiment 4, Jones, Farrand, Stuart, and Morris (1995) employed the ISE to demonstrate that impairment of performance is determined by the changing-state characteristics of the material, rather than its modality of origin. The present study directly replicated the spatial condition of Experiment 4 with N = 40 German participants. In contrast to the original findings, no main effect of sound type was observed, F(2, 78) = 0.81, p = .450, η2p = .02. The absence of an ISE in the spatial domain does not support the changing state hypothesis.

Highlights

The irrelevant speech effect (ISE)—the well-established phenomenon that background speech interferes with serial recall of visually presented material—is considered a fruitful paradigm for examining the structure of shortterm memory (Banbury, Macken, Tremblay, & Jones, 2001)
Salamé and Baddeley (1982) proposed an explanation based on a modular theory of working memory (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974). This model posits that verbal and spatial information is processed in modality-specific subsystems, namely the phonological loop and the visuospatial sketchpad, which are coordinated by the central executive (Baddeley, 1996; Guérard & Tremblay, 2008)
Jones, Farrand, Stuart, and Morris (1995) suggested that interference results from a modality-independent similarity of process rather than content (Beaman & Jones, 1997; Schendel, 2006). They proposed a unitary model of working memory, the object-oriented episodic record (O-OER) model, to explain the ISE

Summary

Introduction

The irrelevant speech effect (ISE)—the well-established phenomenon that background speech interferes with serial recall of visually presented material—is considered a fruitful paradigm for examining the structure of shortterm memory (Banbury, Macken, Tremblay, & Jones, 2001). Contrary to the original results and in line with a modular theory of working memory, interference within the same domain was more marked than across domains In their conceptual replication of Experiment 4, Klatte and Hellbrück (1997) compared the effect of a single speaker (changing state) vs several speakers (steady state) on the serial recall of digits vs Corsi block sequences. The order of the sound type conditions (changing state vs steady state vs silent control condition) was randomized from trial to trial All characteristics of this task in the present replication study were identical with the original study, with the exception that the auditory stimuli were spoken in a female voice instead of a male voice, because no other recording of comparably high quality could be obtained. All experimental material, including the Python code of the experiment, the auditory stimuli, instructions for participants, and R code can be found in the Supplementary Material

Results

Results from Replication Study

Limitations