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

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.

Attentional control and metacognitive monitoring of the effects of different types of task-irrelevant sound on serial recall.

“…The collection of trial-by-trial confidence judgments provided novel insights into participants’ metacognitive awareness of their cognitive performance as a function of different types of auditory distractors. Irrelevant sound effects and task-encoding load effects on participants’ confidence judgments were largely consistent with their effects on objective memory performance, corroborating and extending recent findings of Bell, Mieth, Röer, et al (2021). Moreover, participants were sensitive to trial-by trial variations in their performance, but their metacognitive monitoring accuracy was largely unaffected by both the type of auditory distractor and task-encoding load.…”

“…The present results may be consistent with an automatic attentional capture account, assuming that changing task-irrelevant sounds divert attention from the focal task as a result of an acoustically driven, automatic perceptual analysis (e.g., Körner et al, 2017; Parmentier, 2008). On the other hand, such an automaticity assumption is challenged by the fact that participants were clearly aware of the disruptive effects of irrelevant sound (see also Bell, Mieth, Röer, et al, 2021). Having set out to constrain the duplex-mechanism account proposed by (Hughes, 2014), our data in fact contradict it, suggesting an account whereby both the changing-state effect and the auditory deviation effect are explained with the same mechanism involving involuntary (though aware) attentional orienting responses to certain changes in a stream of irrelevant sound.…”

“…According to a unitary attentional account of auditory distraction (e.g., Bell, Mieth, Röer, et al, 2021), any change in a sound should capture more attention than a repetition of the same sound or continuous noise. Therefore, the above-mentioned changing-state effect can be explained with the same mechanisms as the deviation effect, that is, a diversion of attention from the focal task, assuming that changing-state sound captures more attention than steady-state sound (i.e., owing to habituation of the attentional orienting response to repeated sounds; Bell et al, 2012, 2019; but see Jones et al, 1997).…”

“…Therefore, the changing-state effect on serial recall is supposed to be due to interference-by-process only, whereas the deviation effect is supposed to be the result of attentional capture. In addition, it has been argued that attentional capture (e.g., the deviation effect) should be a form of auditory distraction that is susceptible to top-down cognitive control (Hughes, 2014) and awareness (Hughes & Marsh, 2019), whereas an individual should not be aware of and not be able to control the interference produced by changing-state sound (see also Bell, Mieth, Röer, et al, 2021).…”

“…Some previous studies have assessed monitoring judgments and monitoring accuracy in memory tasks including either auditory distraction or perceptual degradation. Bell, Mieth, Röer, et al (2021) recently reported two studies in which they assessed participants’ metacognitive beliefs, prospective judgments, and retrospective reports about the impact of changing-state sound and auditory deviants on serial recall performance. Their findings offered no support for the hypothesis that people are aware of the effect of auditory deviants but not of changing-state sound.…”