The detrimental effects of a ringing phone on cognitive performance were investigated in four experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, the effects of different types of sounds (a standard cell phone ring, irrelevant tones and an instrumental song commonly encountered by participants) on performance were examined. In Experiment 1, slower responses were observed in all auditory groups relative to a silence condition, but participants in the ring and song conditions recovered more slowly. In Experiment 2, participants who were warned about the potential for distraction recovered more quickly, suggesting a benefit of this prior knowledge. This investigation continued in a college classroom setting (Experiments 3a and 3b); students were exposed to a ringing cell phone during the lecture. Performance on a surprise quiz revealed low accuracy rates on material presented while the phone was ringing. These findings offer insight into top-down cognitive processes that moderate involuntary orienting responses associated with a common stimulus encountered in the environment.
As a commonly used measure of selective attention, it is important to understand the factors contributing to interference in the Stroop task. The current research examined distracting stimuli in the auditory and visual modalities to determine if the use of auditory distractors would create additional interference, beyond what is typically observed in the print-based Stroop task.Research has supported additive effects of auditory and visual distractors; however, there is only one empirical demonstration of this finding to date. Using different versions of the Stroop color naming task, behavioral analyses of reaction times (RT) were conducted, along with distributional RT analyses. The results indicated that a combination of visual and auditory distraction did not lead to a larger interference effect than visually-based distraction alone. These findings suggest that methodological issues may have influenced the prior finding of additive effects of the two modalities, and are discussed in relation to the word production architecture account of Stroop effects.
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