The metacognition of auditory distraction: Judgments about the effects of deviating and changing auditory distractors on cognitive performance

Raoul Bell,Laura Mieth,Jan Philipp Röer,Axel Buchner

doi:10.3758/s13421-021-01200-2

Raoul Bell, Laura Mieth + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-021-01200-2

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Abstract

The duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction has been extended to predict that people should have metacognitive awareness of the disruptive effect of auditory deviants on cognitive performance but little to no such awareness of the disruptive effect of changing-state relative to steady-state auditory distractors. To test this prediction, we assessed different types of metacognitive judgments about the disruptive effects of auditory-deviant, changing-state, and steady-state distractor sequences on serial recall. In a questionnaire, participants read about an irrelevant-speech experiment and were asked to provide metacognitive beliefs about how serial-recall performance would be affected by the different types of distractors. Another sample of participants heard the auditory distractors before predicting how their own serial-recall performance would suffer or benefit from the distractors. After participants had experienced the disruptive effects of the distractor sequences first hand, they were asked to make episodic retrospective judgments about how they thought the distractor sequences had affected their performance. The results consistently show that people are, on average, well aware of the greater disruptive effect of deviant and changing-state relative to steady-state distractors. Irrespective of condition, prospective and retrospective judgments of distraction were poor predictors of the individual susceptibility to distraction. These findings suggest that phenomena of auditory distraction cannot be categorized in two separate classes based on metacognitive awareness.

Highlights

While metacognitive judgments about to-be-learned stimuli have received much attention for some decades (e.g., Begg et al, 1989; Koriat, 1997) and still do so (e.g., Besken & Mulligan, 2014; Frank & Kuhlmann, 2017; Schaper et al, 2019; Undorf & Erdfelder, 2015), metacognitive judgments about to-be-ignored stimuli have received considerably less attention
They believed changing-state sequences to be more disruptive than steady-state sequences, F(1,188) = 20.78, p < .001, ηp2 = .10, which corresponds to the belief in a changing-state effect
Metacognitive beliefs were assessed by showing participants abstract descriptions of different types of distractor sequences and asking them to indicate how they believed that these sequences would affect serial-recall performance

Summary

Introduction

While metacognitive judgments about to-be-learned stimuli (judgments of learning) have received much attention for some decades (e.g., Begg et al, 1989; Koriat, 1997) and still do so (e.g., Besken & Mulligan, 2014; Frank & Kuhlmann, 2017; Schaper et al, 2019; Undorf & Erdfelder, 2015), metacognitive judgments about to-be-ignored stimuli (judgments of distraction) have received considerably less attention (but see Ellermeier & Zimmer, 1997; Hanczakowski et al, 2017, 2018; Röer et al, 2017). The duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction (Hughes, 2014) postulates that the changing-state effect and the auditory-deviant effect are completely dissociated from each other because they represent two fundamentally different forms of distraction: interference-by-process (Type I) and attentional diversion (Type II). The beliefs about steady-state, auditory-deviant, and changing-state sequences were assessed by three questions embedded in a more comprehensive survey about metacognitive beliefs on auditory distraction In this survey, participants read abstract descriptions of the levels of the distractor-sound manipulation without being provided with concrete examples of these distractors so that their judgments about how this type of material may affect serial-recall performance could not be based on the immediate experience of perceptual cues but had to be based on the participants’ preexisting beliefs. The present study allows for a novel test of these two competing accounts

Participants

Results

Discussion

Objective sound effects