This study looks at the effects of silence as compared to two different types of music and one type of irrelevant speech to analyze the effects on an assessment of 4 categories of mathematical questions. The hypothesis tested was that students would perform best when subject to no distraction (silence), followed closely by non-verbal music (dubstep), while verbal music (Rap) and irrelevant self-speech (repeating the word ‘za’) would result in a decrease in performance. The hypothesis was not found to be statistically significant, but a general trend supporting the hypothesis was present and found to be consistent with similar research. / text

An effective alarm system is a critical part of many different types of jobs. It is also important that the alarm signal can capture human attention and convey appropriate urgency. In the current study the effect of siren sounds with or without unexpected, deviant sounds represented by a change of speed (a temporal deviant) were tested to evaluate if such change could successfully capture attention. The results showed that distraction was more pronounced when the deviant within the sound was a change from fast to slow as compared with slow to fast. Therefore, an alarm signal using a temporal deviant – changing from fast to slow—can be effective in capturing human attention and might be factored into the design of alarm systems.

The irrelevant sound effect (ISE) describes the disruption of processes involved in maintaining information in working memory (WM) when irrelevant noise is present in the environment. While some posit that the ISE arises due to split obligation of attention to the irrelevant sound and the to-be-remembered information, others have argued that background noise corrupts the order of information within WM. Support for the latter position comes from research showing that the ISE appears to be most robust in tasks that emphasize ordered maintenance by a serial rehearsal strategy, and diminished when rehearsal is discouraged or precluded by task characteristics. Evidence supporting such a stance has been used to create a narrow narrative in which the ISE should only emerge on tasks with ordered output demands, when a serial rehearsal strategy is used, and in the presence of changing-state auditory distractor sequences. However, an ISE has been documented in many situations that do not match the scenario described above, thus raising questions as to what specific factors and combination of factors give rise to the ISE. The present study aims to disentangle each of the proposed contributing variables to the ISE by using eight working memory tasks that vary based on demands and features in the presence of multiple sound conditions. Further, strategy use is assessed on a task-by-task basis using an informed, multi-step process. The results reveal patterns of the ISE that do not match the claims made by rehearsal-disruption nor attentional accounts, and instead support a narrative in which poor cognitive control likely leads to the adoption of ineffective strategies for memory maintenance, and the combination of such factors increases one’s susceptibility to disruption by irrelevant sounds. / Psychology

Ringing phones are common in work space environments in the 21th century and while capturing the attention of the call-taker they also tend to disrupt people in the surrounding environment. This study aims to investigate the attentional capturing effect of ringtones by comparing sudden and increasing onsets with quiet and noise masking conditions while participants undertook a test of short-term memory for serial order (serial recall). The experiment presented new evidence that increasing ringtone sounds have a disruptive effect on serial recall processing. A masking noise background, however, successfully eliminated the effect of the increasing ringtone sound.  In contrary to what was anticipated, the ringtone with the sudden onset did not cause an attentional capture effect, suggesting at least in behavioural terms, it was successfully ignored. The results are discussed in relation to the literature on looking effects. Increasing ringtone sounds may appear looming, with sudden onset sounds decreasing in volume appearing receding. The central idea is that looming sounds are more disruptive to serial recall because they cause a diversion of attention from the serial recall task so as to react to the apparently approaching sound. The disruption attributable to looming sounds may be a form of attentional capture that is more specific than those triggered by deviant events within a to-be-ignored stream of sounds.