How Concentration Shields Against Distraction

In this article, we outline our view of how concentration shields against distraction. We argue that higher levels of concentration make people less susceptible to distraction for two reasons. One reason is that the undesired processing of the background environment is reduced. For example, when people play a difficult video game, as opposed to an easy game, they are less likely to notice what people in the background are saying. The other reason is that the locus of attention becomes more steadfast. For example, when people are watching an entertaining episode of their favorite television series, as opposed to a less absorbing show, attention is less likely to be diverted away from the screen by a ringing telephone. The theoretical underpinnings of this perspective, and potential implications for applied settings, are addressed

Differences in Auditory Distraction between Adults and Children: A Duplex-mechanism Approach

Differences in the impact of irrelevant sound on recall performance in children (aged 7–9 years old; N = 89) compared to adults (aged 18–22 years old; N = 89) were examined. Tasks that required serial rehearsal (serial and probed-order recall tasks) were contrasted with one that did not (the missing-item task) in the presence of irrelevant sound that was either steady-state (a repeated speech token), changing-state (two alternating speech tokens) and, for the first time with a child sample, could also contain a deviant token (a male-voice token embedded in a sequence otherwise spoken in a female voice). Participants either completed tasks in which the to-be-remembered list-length was adjusted to individual digit span or was fixed at one item greater than the average span we observed for the age-group. The disruptive effects of irrelevant sound did not vary across the two methods of determining list-length. We found that tasks encouraging serial rehearsal were especially affected by changing-state sequences for both age-groups (i.e., the changing-state effect) and there were no group differences in relation to this effect. In contrast, disruption by a deviant sound—generally assumed to be the result of attentional diversion—was evident among children in all three tasks while adults were less susceptible to this effect. This pattern of results suggests that developmental differences in distraction are due to differences in attentional control rather than serial rehearsal efficiency

Distraction Control Processes in Free Recall: Costs and Benefits to Performance

How is semantic memory influenced by individual differences under conditions of distraction? This question was addressed by observing how visual target words—drawn from a single category—were recalled whilst ignoring spoken distracter words that were either members of the same, or members of a different (single) category. Distracter words were presented either synchronously or asynchronously with target words. Recall performance was correlated with participants’ working memory capacity (WMC), which was taken to be an index of the capacity for distracter inhibition. Distraction was greater from semantically similar words and distraction was greater when the words were presented synchronously. WMC was related to disruption only with synchronous, not asynchronous, presentation. Subsequent experiments found more distracter inhibition – as measured by subsequent negative priming of distracters – amongst individuals with higher WMC but this may be dependent on targets and distracters being comparable category exemplars: With less dominant category members as distracters, target recall was impaired – relative to control – only amongst individuals with low WMC. The results demonstrate distracter inhibition occurring only in conditions where target-distracter selection is challenging. Inhibition incurs costs to subsequent performance, but there is an immediate price for not inhibiting

ICBEN review of research on the biological effects of noise 2011-2014

The mandate of the International Commission on Biological Effects of Noise (ICBEN) is to promote a high level of scientific research concerning all aspects of noise-induced effects on human beings and animals. In this review, ICBEN team chairs and co-chairs summarize relevant findings, publications, developments, and policies related to the biological effects of noise, with a focus on the period 2011-2014 and for the following topics: Noise-induced hearing loss; nonauditory effects of noise; effects of noise on performance and behavior; effects of noise on sleep; community response to noise; and interactions with other agents and contextual factors. Occupational settings and transport have been identified as the most prominent sources of noise that affect health. These reviews demonstrate that noise is a prevalent and often underestimated threat for both auditory and nonauditory health and that strategies for the prevention of noise and its associated negative health consequences are needed to promote public health

Editorial: Cognitive hearing science: Investigating the relationship between selective attention and brain activity

Funding Agencies|Swedish Research Council; [2017-06092]</p

The negative footprint illusion is exacerbated by the numerosity of environment-friendly additions: unveiling the underpinning mechanisms

The addition of environmentally friendly items to a set of conventional items sometimes leads people to believe that the carbon footprint of the entire set decreases rather than increases. This negative footprint illusion is supposedly underpinned by an averaging bias: people base environmental impact estimates not on the total impact of items but on their average. However, direct evidence for this underpinning mechanism is sparse. In the current paper, we tested novel predictions of the averaging-bias account. We found that the illusion’s magnitude increased with the addition of a greater number of “green” items when the number of conventional items was held constant (Studies 1 and 2), thus providing further support for the averaging bias account. We also challenged the account by testing what happens when the number of items in the conventional and “green” categories vary while holding the ratio between the two categories constant (Study 3). At odds with the averaging account, the magnitude of the illusion increased as the category size increased, thus revealing a potential role of a category-size bias. The results raise questions regarding the potential interplay between these two types of bias in the negative footprint illusion