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

When distraction helps: Evidence that concurrent articulation and irrelevant speech can facilitate insight problem solving

We report an experiment investigating the “special-process” theory of insight problem solving, which claims that insight arises from non-conscious, non-reportable processes that enable problem re-structuring. We predicted that reducing opportunities for speech-based processing during insight problem solving should permit special processes to function more effectively and gain conscious awareness, thereby facilitating insight. We distracted speech-based processing by using either articulatory suppression or irrelevant speech, with findings for these conditions supporting the predicted insight facilitation effect relative to silent working or thinking aloud. The latter condition was included to investigate the currently contested effect of “verbal overshadowing” on insight, whereby thinking aloud is claimed to hinder the operation of special, non-reportable processes. Whilst verbal overshadowing was not evident in final solution rates, there was nevertheless support for verbal overshadowing up to and beyond the mid-point of the available problem solving time. Overall our data support a special-process theory of insight, whilst also pointing to the role of moderator variables (e.g., available time for solution) in determining the presence or absence of effects predicted by the special-process account

Attentional capture by deviant sounds: A non-contingent form of auditory distraction?

The occurrence of an unexpected, infrequent sound in an otherwise homogeneous auditory background tends to disrupt the ongoing cognitive task. This ‘deviation effect’ is typically explained in terms of attentional capture whereby the deviant sound draws attention away from the focal activity, regardless of the nature of this activity. Yet, there is theoretical and empirical evidence suggesting that the attention-capture mechanism underlying this form of distraction could rather be triggered in a task-contingent fashion. The present study aimed at determining whether the auditory deviation effect reflects the action of either a stimulus-driven or a task-contingent orienting mechanism. To do so, we conducted a systematic investigation whereby the impact of verbal deviants—a letter embedded in the repetition of another letter—and spatial deviants—a sound presented contralaterally to the other sounds—on verbal and spatial short-term memory was assessed. This study established that both verbal and spatial deviants can hinder both verbal and spatial order-reconstruction (Experiment 1) and missing-item tasks (Experiment 2). Such results demonstrate that the deviation effect reflects a general form of auditory distraction as interference took place both within and across domains and regardless of the processes engaged in the focal tas

Is Auditory Distraction by Changing-State and Deviant Sounds Underpinned by the Same Mechanism? Evidence from Pupillometry

The mere presence of task-irrelevant auditory stimuli is known to interfere with cognitive functioning. Disruption can be caused by changing auditory distractors (the changing-state effect) or by a sound that deviates from the auditory background (the deviation effect). The unitary account of auditory distraction explains both phenomena in terms of attentional capture whereas the duplex-mechanism account posits that they reflect two fundamentally different forms of distraction in which only the deviation effect is caused by attentional capture. To test these predictions, we exploited a physiological index of attention orienting: the pupillary dilation response (PDR). Participants performed visual serial recall while ignoring sequences of spoken letters. These sequences either comprised repeated or changing letters, and one letter could sometimes be replaced by pink noise (the deviant). Recall was poorer in both changing-state and deviant trials. Interestingly, the PDR was elicited by deviant sounds but not changing-state sounds. This physiological dissociation of the changing-state and the deviation effects suggests they are subtended by distinct mechanisms thereby procuring support for the duplex-mechanism account over the unitary account

Can intrinsic and extrinsic metacognitive cues shield against distraction in problem solving?

We investigated the capacity for two different forms of metacognitive cue to shield against auditory distraction in problem solving with Compound Remote Associates Tasks (CRATs). Experiment 1 demonstrated that an intrinsic metacognitive cue in the form of processing disfluency (manipulated using an easy-to-read vs. difficult-to-read font) could increase focal task engagement so as to mitigate the detrimental impact of distraction on solution rates for CRATs. Experiment 2 showed that an extrinsic metacognitive cue that took the form of an incentive for good task performance (i.e., 80% or better CRAT solutions) could likewise eliminate the negative impact of distraction on CRAT solution rates. Overall, these findings support the view that both intrinsic and extrinsic metacognitive cues have remarkably similar effects. This suggests that metacognitive cues operate via a common underlying mechanism whereby a participant applies increased focal attention to the primary task so as to ensure more steadfast task engagement that is not so easily diverted by task-irrelevant stimuli

The Functional Determinants of Short-Term Memory: Evidence From Perceptual-Motor Interference in Verbal Serial Recall

A functional, perceptual-motor, account of serial short-term memory (STM) is examined by investigating the way in which an irrelevant spoken sequence interferes with verbal serial recall. Even with visual list-presentation, verbal serial recall is particularly susceptible to disruption by irrelevant spoken stimuli that have the same identity as— but that are order-incongruent with—the to-be-remembered items. We test the view that such interference is because of the obligatory perceptual organization of the spoken stimuli yielding a sequence that competes with a subvocal motor-plan assembled to support the reproduction of the to-be-remembered list. In support of this view, the interference can be eliminated without changing either the identities or objective serial order of the spoken stimuli but merely by promoting a subjective perceptual organization that strips them of their order-incongruent relation to the to-be-remembered list (Experiment 1). The interference is also eliminated if subvocal motor sequenceplanning is impeded via articulatory suppression (Experiment 2). The results are in line with the view that performance-limits in verbal serial STM are because of having to exploit perceptual and motor processes for purposes for which they did not evolve, not the inherently limited capacity of structures or mechanisms dedicated to storage

Failing to get the gist of what's being said : background noise impairs higher-order cognitive processing

A dynamic interplay is known to exist between auditory processing and human cognition. For example, prior investigations of speech-in-noise have revealed there is more to learning than just listening: Even if all words within a spoken list are correctly heard in noise, later memory for those words is typically impoverished. These investigations supported a view that there is a "gap" between the intelligibility of speech and memory for that speech. Here, the notion was that this gap between speech intelligibility and memorability is a function of the extent to which the spoken message seizes limited immediate memory resources (e.g., Kiellberg et al., 2008). Accordingly, the more difficult the processing of the spoken message, the less resources are available for elaboration, storage, and recall of that spoken material. However, it was not previously known how increasing that difficulty affected the memory processing of semantically rich spoken material. This investigation showed that noise impairs higher levels of cognitive analysis. A variant of the Deese-Roediger-McDermott procedure that encourages semantic elaborative processes was deployed. On each trial, participants listened to a 36-item list comprising 12 words blocked by each of 3 different themes. Each of those 12 words (e.g., bed, tired, snore...) was associated with a "critical" lure theme word that was not presented (e.g., sleep). Word lists were either presented without noise or at a signal-to-noise ratio of 5 decibels upon an A-weighting. Noise reduced false recall of the critical words, and decreased the semantic clustering of recall. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.Peer reviewe

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

Corrigendum: Failing to get the gist of what's being said: background noise impairs higher-order cognitive processing.

[This corrects the article on p. 548 in vol. 6, PMID: 26052289.]