The Irrelevant Sound Phenomenon Revisited: What Role for Working Memory Capacity?

Abstract

High-span individuals (as measured by the operation span [OSPAN] technique) are less likely than lowspan individuals to notice their own names in an unattended auditory stream (A. R. A. Conway, N. Cowan, & M. F. Bunting, 2001). The possibility that OSPAN accounts for individual differences in auditory distraction on an immediate recall test was examined. There was no evidence that high-OSPAN participants were more resistant to the disruption caused by irrelevant speech in serial or in free recall. Low-OSPAN participants did, however, make more semantically related intrusion errors from the irrelevant sound stream in a free recall test (Experiment 4). Results suggest that OSPAN mediates semantic components of auditory distraction dissociable from other aspects of the irrelevant sound effect. I thank Al Harvey for critical readings of earlier versions of this article, Natalie Lynch for running Experiment 3, and Sophie Scott for useful discussions. Nelson Cowan and Emily Elliott suggested Experiment 3.

Coherence of the irrelevant-sound effect: Individual profiles of short-term memory and susceptibility to task-irrelevant materials

“…For the most part, we have confirmed the previous (Beaman, 2004;Ellermeier & Zimmer, 1997;Neath et al, 2003) indications that this susceptibility to the ISE is unrelated to memory span. However, we have also demonstrated the existence of various levels of susceptibility to the ISE, consistent across speech and tone effects, for participants at each level of span (see Figure 1).…”

“…Although this hypothesis was not confirmed in one recent study with adult participants (Beaman, 2004), in Experiment 2 we reexamined this issue with samples of secondgrade children and adults, using both irrelevant speech and irrelevant tones, as in Experiment 1. In this experiment, the list length depended on the individual's span, so that the level of difficulty could be kept comparable across age groups.…”

“…These results provide one possible explanation for the puzzling absence of negative correlations between various sorts of working-memory span and the ISE (Beaman, 2004;Ellermeier & Zimmer, 1997;Neath, Farley, & Surprenant, 2003). A mechanism that, by itself, leads toward such negative correlations theoretically may still exist, but it may be balanced out (or sometimes outweighed) by the factors leading toward a positive correlation, as was discussed above.…”

“…A third study (Beaman, 2004) similarly indicates no significant correlation between irrelevant speech and the level of performance in an oftenused measure of WM capacity known as operation span, which taxes attention by requiring participants to carry out an arithmetic operation before each item to be retained for later recall (Turner & Engle, 1989).…”

External validation of the computerized, group administrable adaptation of the “operation span task”

“…Both the internal consistency and the temporal stability of OSPAN are higher than those of the reading span test (Klein & Fiss, 1999;Turner & Engle, 1989); hence, it can be considered to give a more reliable WMC index. Thanks to these advantages, OSPAN has become one of the most widely used WMC tasks (Beaman, 2004;Bleckley et al, 2003;Brumback et al, 2005;De Neys, d'Ydewalle, Schaeken, & Vos, 2002;Kane & Engle, 2000;Kane et al, 2004).…”