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142
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Introduction
My research concerns the cognitive psychology of auditory distraction and in particular the development of an account of semantic auditory distraction. Other strands of research include: evaluation of the perceptual-gestural account of short-term memory; the genesis of false memory; person recognition (particularly in relation to face construction), and the effects of eco-labeling.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
June 2020 - present
January 2017 - May 2020
October 2011 - March 2012
Education
October 2002 - April 2006
October 1998 - June 2002
University of Abertay, Dundee
Field of study
- Psychology with Biology
Publications
Publications (142)
Two experiments investigated reactive top-down cognitive control of the detrimental influence of spoken distractors semantically related to words presented visually for free recall. Experiment 1 demonstrated that an increase in focal-task engagement-promoted experimentally by reducing the perceptual discriminability of the visual target words-elimi...
In this paper, 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 ea...
Two experiments examined the extent to which erroneous recall blocks veridical recall using, as a vehicle for study, the disruptive impact of distractors that are semantically similar to a list of words presented for free recall. Instructing participants to avoid erroneous recall of to-be-ignored spoken distractors attenuated their recall but this...
Consumers believe that “eco-labeled” products taste better, which, at least in part, may be an effect of the label. The purpose of the current series of experiments was to examine some mechanisms and limits of this eco-label effect. In Experiment 1, an eco-label effect of similar magnitude was found for taste ratings of both conventional and organi...
When news media talk about climate change, they often report on extreme weather in places around the world. One factor that may explain perceptions of such reports and reactions to them is people’s relationships with affected places. We test a framework of place affinity, as indicated by several place beliefs, to describe these people-place relatio...
Two competing accounts propose that the disruption of short-term memory by irrelevant speech arises either due to interference-by-process (e.g., changing-state effect) or attentional capture, but it is unclear how whispering affects the irrelevant speech effect. According to the interference-by-process account, whispered speech should be less disru...
When asked to estimate the carbon footprint of a bundle of low carbon footprint and high carbon footprint items, people typically report a lower value compared to estimating the high carbon footprint items alone. This finding is called the negative footprint illusion. Previous research suggests that people might be made less susceptible to this eff...
Purpose
Nuclear energy is a contested topic, requiring trade-offs in energy independence, ethicality and uncertainty. Anthropogenic climate change complicates these decisions further, with nuclear energy competing with other low-carbon and sustainable energy sources. Decisions about nuclear energy’s role, as part of a sustainable energy system, mus...
Previous research suggests that unexpected (deviant) sounds negatively affect reading performance by inhibiting saccadic planning, which models of reading agree takes place simultaneous to parafoveal processing. This study examined the effect of deviant sounds on foveal and parafoveal processing. Participants read single sentences in quiet, standar...
Can memory of eco-labeling bias how consumption is perceived and influence subsequent consumer decisions? We report three experiments showing that the perceived environmental friendliness of simulated shopping sequences is disproportionately influenced by what happens at the end of the sequence. For example, sequences that ended with a high carbon...
In an influential article, Jones et al. (1995) provide evidence that auditory distraction by changing relative to repetitive auditory distracters (the changing-state effect) did not differ between a visual–verbal and visual–spatial serial recall task, providing evidence for an amodal mechanism for the representation of serial order in short-term me...
When people estimate the summative carbon footprint of a sequence of events, how are the individual events integrated? In three experiments, we found that summative carbon footprint judgments of item sequences are disproportionately influenced by items at the end of the sequence in comparison with those at the beginning—a recency effect. When, for...
In two experiments investigating hemispheric asymmetries in auditory distraction, the spatial location of to-be-ignored sound was manipulated. Prior studies indicated a left-ear disadvantage for changing-state sequences during short-term serial recall but lacked a direct measure of the changing-state effect. Experiment 1 compared changing-state wit...
Children with inattention and hyperactivity often present difficulties in recognising anger from other people’s voices. Research has shown enhanced brain activity (N100) to vocal anger, possibly reflecting preattentive hyper-vigilance to vocal anger, in children with clinical levels of inattention and hyperactivity. In this study we investigated th...
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...
We examine whether the disruption of serial short-term memory (STM) by spoken taboo distractors is due to attentional diversion and unrelated to the underlying disruptive effect of sound on serial STM more generally, which we have argued is due to order
cues arising from the automatic pre-categorical processing of acoustic changes in the sound conf...
The process-oriented account of auditory distraction suggests that task-disruption is a consequence of the joint action of task- and sound-related processes. Here, four experiments put this view to the test by examining the extent to which to-be-ignored melodies (with or without lyrics) influence vocal-motor processing. Using song retrieval tasks (...
Meta-reasoning refers to the metacognitive processes that monitor and control ongoing thinking, reasoning and problem-solving. These monitoring processes are usually experienced as feelings of “certainty” or “uncertainty” regarding how well a process is unfolding. The “meta-reasoning framework” advanced by Ackerman and Thompson (2017) captures many...
The current study aimed: (i) to identify personal characteristics associated with endorsing conspiracy theories; and (ii) to investigate methods for dispelling conspiracy beliefs. Participants were shown a single conspiracy theory and they also completed questionnaires about their reasoning skills, types of information processing (System 1 vs. Syst...
What causes interference in short-term memory? In this paper, we report the novel finding that immediate memory for visually-presented verbal items is sensitive to disruption from task-irrelevant vibrotactile stimuli. Specifically, short-term memory for a visual sequence is disrupted when a concurrently presented sequence of vibrations is presented...
The performance of a visual focal task is appreciably disrupted by an unexpected change (or deviation) in the properties of a task irrelevant auditory background. A vast amount of evidence suggests that a change in the acoustic properties of sound disrupts performance via attentional capture. However, an emerging body of evidence suggests that the...
As climate impacts become more visible, an increasing number of people experience or hear about distressing events such as flooding, landscape change and biodiversity loss. Most of these reports refer to specific places. It is therefore likely that people’s relationships with these places influence their perception of the climate crisis overall. In...
Introduction: Whether the post-categorical, semantic properties of task-irrelevant speech are processed has been a source of debate between two central accounts. The first, a structural account, proposes that the semantic content of irrelevant speech is filtered out early on, and thus remains unprocessed. The second account proposes that the semant...
Meta-reasoning refers to the metacognitive processes that monitor and control ongoing thinking, reasoning and problem-solving. These monitoring processes are usually experienced as feelings of “certainty” or “uncertainty” regarding how well a process is unfolding. The “meta-reasoning framework” advanced by Ackerman and Thompson (2017) captures many...
The presence of a weapon in the perpetration of a crime can impede an observer’s ability to describe and/or recognise the person responsible. In the current experiment, we explore whether weapons when present at encoding of a target identity interfere with the construction of a facial composite. Participants encoded an unfamiliar target face seen e...
Received 17 December 2021 Accepted 09 June 2022
KEYWORDS
Foreknowledge; speech intelligibility; irrelevant speech; auditory distraction
ABSTRACT
Providing participants with an opportunity to listen to a forthcoming distracter sentence has been shown to attenuate its disruptive effect on short-term memory. On the stimulus-specific attentional diver...
The construct of psychological distance has gained traction as an explanation of why climate change is difficult to act on; it often feels far removed, with impacts arising in remote locations to other people or in an uncertain future. However, recent studies and narrative reviews have pointed out inconsistencies in the conceptualisation, operation...
As a climate change mitigation strategy, environmentally certified ‘green’ buildings with low carbon footprints are becoming more prevalent in the world. An interesting psychological question is how people perceive the carbon footprint of these buildings given their spatial distributions in a given community. Here we examine whether regular distrib...
Sounds that deviate, acoustically or semantically, from prevailing auditory backgrounds disrupt ongoing mental activity. An acoustic deviant is held to capture attention, but doubt has been cast on the attentional nature of the semantic, categorical deviation effect. Unlike the acoustical deviation effect, which is typically amenable to top-down co...
Referring to the well-replicated finding that the presence of to-be-ignored sound disrupts short-term memory for serially-presented visual items, the irrelevant sound effect (ISE) is an important benchmark finding within cognitive psychology. The ISE has proven useful in evaluating the structure, function and development of short-term memory. This...
A rare and unexpected change (or deviation) in the properties of an irrelevant auditory background can disrupt performance of a visual focal task via attentional capture. Although this effect is typically caused by a change in the acoustic properties of the sound, recent evidence has shown that a change in (semantic) category within a sound stream...
People consistently act in ways that harm the environment, even when believing their actions are environmentally friendly. A case in point is a biased judgment termed the negative footprint illusion, which arises when people believe that the addition of “eco-friendly” items (e.g., environmentally certified houses) to conventional items (e.g., stand...
One of the today’s greatest challenges is to adjust our behavior so that we can avoid a major climate disaster. To do so, we must make sacrifices for the sake of the environment. The study reported here investigates how anchors (extrinsic motivational-free information) and normative messages (extrinsic motivational information) influence people’s t...
Visual-verbal serial recall is disrupted when task-irrelevant background speech has to be ignored. Contrary to previous suggestion, it has recently been shown that the magnitude of disruption may be accentuated by the semantic properties of the irrelevant speech. Sentences ending with unexpected words that did not match the preceding semantic conte...
The construct of psychological distance has gained traction as an explanation of why climate change is difficult to act on; it often feels far removed, with impacts arising in remote locations to other people or in an uncertain future. However, recent studies and narrative reviews have pointed out inconsistencies in the conceptualisation, operation...
Video of conference presentation.
Corresponding to the topics of Team 4 of the International Commission on Biological Effects of Noise (ICBEN), a literature review is presented covering the years 2017 to 2021 with a focus on the effects of noise on cognitive performance and the methods used to study these effects. We used sound or noise and cognitive performance as well as several...
Acoustical environments affect cognitive work. Disruption of serial recall performance by background speech depends upon the content of the to-be-ignored sequence of sound beyond the fact of change. Increments in token set size, the number of different types of sound in such sequences, can increase the extent of disruption: Increments in set size f...
People’s belief that one or more environmentally friendly items that are added to a set of conventional items can reduce the total environmental impact of these items (the negative footprint illusion) could lead to unwanted environmental consequences. An averaging bias seems to underpin this illusion: people make their estimates based on the averag...
Memory is facilitated by reflecting upon, or revisiting, the environment in which information was encoded. We investigated these “context reinstatement” (CR) techniques to improve the
effectiveness of facial composites – visual likenesses of a perpetrator’s face constructed by
eyewitnesses. Participant-constructors viewed a face and, after a one-da...
Controversy exists regarding the processes involved in creative thinking with the Remote Associates Test (RAT) and the Compound Remote Associates Test (CRAT). We report three experiments that aimed to shed light on the component processes underpinning CRAT
performance by using the mere presence of task-irrelevant sound as a key theoretical tool. Ex...
Data on orienting and habituation to irrelevant sound can distinguish between task-specific and general accounts of auditory distraction: Distractors either disrupt specific cognitive processes (e.g., Jones, 1993; Salamé & Baddeley, 1982), or remove more general-purpose attentional resources from any attention-demanding task (e.g., Cowan, 1995). Te...
Effects of speech on two reading tasks
Recognition following long delays is superior for highly attractive and highly unattractive faces (cf. medium-attractive faces). In the current work, we investigated participants’ ability to recreate from memory faces of low, medium, and high physical attractiveness. In Experiment 1, participants constructed composites of familiar (celebrity) faces...
Recognition following long delays is superior for highly attractive and highly
unattractive faces (cf. medium-attractive faces). In the current work, we
investigated participants’ ability to recreate from memory faces of low-, medium- and
high physical attractiveness. In Experiment 1, participants constructed composites of
familiar (celebrity) face...
Task-irrelevant background sound can disrupt performance of visually based cognitive tasks. The cross-modal breakdown of attentional selectivity in the context of reading was addressed using analyses of eye movements. Moreover, the study addressed whether task-sensitivity to distraction via background speech on reading was modulated by the cognitiv...
Classically, attentional selectivity has been conceptualized as a passive by-product of capacity-limits on stimulus-processing. Here, we examine the role of more active cognitive control processes in attentional selectivity, focusing on how distraction from task-irrelevant sound is modulated by levels of task-engagement in a visually-presented shor...
We report a dissociation of two forms of auditory distraction within a single repeated-measures experiment using a novel Stroop serial recall task in which participants were oriented either to serially recall six color-words (low task-load condition) or the incongruent colors in which those words were presented (high task-load condition). The disru...
Automatic information processing has been and still is a debated topic. Traditionally, automatic processes are deemed to take place autonomously and independently of top-down cognitive control. For decades, the literature on reading has brought to the fore empirical phenomena such as Stroop and semantic priming effects that provide support for the...
Irrelevant sounds can be very distracting, especially when trying to recall information according to its serial order. The irrelevant sound effect (ISE) has been studied in the literature for more than 40 years, yet many questions remain. One goal that has received little attention involves the discernment of a predictive factor, or individual diff...
Bilinguals often show a disadvantage in lexical access on verbal fluency tasks wherein the criteria require the production of words from semantic categories. However, the pattern is more heterogeneous for letter (phonemic) fluency wherein the task is to produce words beginning with a given letter. Here, bilinguals often outperform monolinguals. One...
Two experiments critically examined a predictive-coding based account of the vulnerability of short-term memory to auditory distraction, particularly the disruptive effect of changing-state sound on verbal serial recall. Experiment 1 showed that providing participants with the opportunity to predict the contents of an imminent spoken distractor sen...
This study examines the potential vulnerability of short-term memory processes to distraction by spatial changes within to-be-ignored bimodal, vibratory, and auditory stimuli. Participants were asked to recall sequences of serially presented digits or locations of dots while being exposed to to-be-ignored stimuli. On unexpected occasions, the bimod...
Background music has been claimed to enhance people's creativity. In three experiments, we investigated the impact of background music on performance of Compound Remote Associate Tasks (CRATs), which are widely thought to tap creativity. Background music with foreign (unfamiliar) lyrics (Experiment 1), instrumental music without lyrics (Experiment...
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...
Recent investigations have established the value of using rebus puzzles in studying the insight and analytic processes that underpin problem solving. The current study sought to validate a pool of 84 rebus puzzles in terms of their solution rates, solution times, error rates, solution confidence, self-reported solution strategies, and solution phra...
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fnhum.2018.00298.].
Purpose: To extend our knowledge of the functional linkages between visual fatigue and regional cerebral prefrontal cortex (PFC) oxygenation, we measured time related hemodynamic changes over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) during convergence load under conflicting stimulus-to-accommodation and stimulus-to-vergence eye movements wi...
Telephone conversation is ubiquitous within the office setting. Overhearing a telephone conversation—whereby only one of the two speakers is heard—is subjectively more annoying and objectively more distracting than overhearing a full conversation. The present study sought to determine whether this "halfalogue" effect is attributable to unexpected o...
When ‘environmentally friendly’ items are added to a set of conventional items, people report that the total set will have a lower environmental impact even though the actual impact increases. One hypothesis is that this “negative footprint illusion” arises because people, who are susceptible to the illusion, lack necessary knowledge of the item’s...
This study investigated the role of the acoustic distinctiveness of spoken distracters in semantic auditory distraction. Experiment 1 showed that when sequences of auditory distracter words were semantically related to words presented visually for free recall,
presenting them in seven vs. one voice increased the erroneous recall of those distracter...
We report an experiment investigating how stimulus complexity and conceptual fluency (i.e., the ease of deriving meaning) influence aesthetic liking judgments for abstract artworks. We presented participants with paintings at two levels of complexity (high vs. low) and five levels of conceptual fluency (determined from a prior norming study) and re...
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 inc...
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 th...
Task-irrelevant speech impairs short-term serial recall appreciably. On the interference-by-process account, the processing of physical (i.e., pre-categorical) changes in speech yields order cues that conflict with the serial-ordering process deployed to perform the serial recall task. In this view, the post-categorical properties (e.g., phonology,...
An ongoing debate surrounds whether bilinguals outperform monolinguals in tests of executive processing. The aim of this study was to investigate if there are long-term (10 year) bilingual advantages in executive processing, as indexed by dual-task performance, in a sample that were 40–65 years at baseline. The bilingual (n = 24) and monolingual (n...
The basics components of E-Prime are described. E-Prime is a suite of computer programs developed by Psychology Software Tools, Inc. to allow the design and implementation of computer-based experiments.
Deviant as well as changing auditory distractors interfere with short-term memory. According to the duplex model of auditory distraction, the deviation effect is caused by a shift of attention while the changing-state effect is due to obligatory order processing. This theory predicts that foreknowledge should reduce the deviation effect, but should...
It is widely held that single-word lexical access is a competitive process, a view based largely on the observation that naming a picture is slowed in the presence of a distractor-word. However, problematic for this view is that a low-frequency distractor-word slows the naming of a picture more than does a high-frequency word. This supports an alte...
Cell-phone conversation is ubiquitous within public spaces. The current study investigates whether ignored cell-phone conversation impairs eyewitness memory for a perpetrator. Participants viewed a video of a staged crime in the presence of 1 side of a comprehensible cell-phone conversation (meaningful halfalogue), 2 sides of a comprehensible cell-...
A corrigendum on Failing to get the gist of what's being said: background noise impairs higher-order cognitive processing by Marsh
Individuals with schizophrenia typically show increased levels of distractibility. This has been attributed to impaired working memory capacity (WMC), since lower WMC is typically associated with higher distractibility and schizophrenia is typically associated with impoverished WMC. Here, participants performed verbal and spatial serial recall task...
Research is presented that focused on the impact of varying types of background music on the performance of a task thought to tap creativity: the compound remote associate task (CRAT). Findings from three experiments revealed that background music with: foreign lyrics, familiar lyrics and instrumental music without lyrics all significantly impaired...
A functional, perceptual-motor, account of serial short-term memory 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 which...
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...
Concerning how a to-be-ignored sequence of sounds causes auditory distraction during a serial recall task, the strong stance of the changing-state hypothesis (Tremblay and Jones, 1998) postulated that the fact of change determines the extent of disruption. However, Tremblay and Jones favoured the stimulus-mismatch version of the changing-state hypo...
Creativity is a vital aspect of cognition underpinning activities such as innovative product design, scientific advancement and effective advertising and marketing communications. With a recent trend toward the popularity of coffee-shop environments for individual study or office style working, the role that ambient noise can play in influencing cr...
Background: Background speech is one of the most disturbing noise sources at shared workplaces in terms of both annoyance and performance-related disruption. Therefore it is important to identify techniques that can efficiently protect performance against distraction. However, whilst it is important that the technique protects against distraction,...
The rostral brainstem receives both “bottom-up” input from the ascending auditory system and “top-down” descending corticofugal connections. Speech information passing through the inferior colliculus of elderly listeners reflects the periodicity envelope of a speech syllable. This information arguably also reflects a composite of temporal-fine-stru...
The contribution of two mechanisms of auditory distraction in verbal serial short-term memory—interference with the serial rehearsal processes used to support short-term recall and general attentional diversion—was investigated by exploiting differences in auditory distraction in children and adults. Experiment 1 showed that serial rehearsal plays...
What reason underpins why people say they prefer eco-labeled over conventional products during direct perceptual comparison? One possibility is that there is no difference in the perceptual experience of the products; the participants just say there is because they wish to gain other’s approval. In this paper, we tested this social desirability acc...
As the demand for eco-friendly food—produced without pesticides and environmentally harmful chemicals—increases, the need to develop genetically modified (GM) organisms that are more resistant to parasites and other environmental crop threats may increase. Because of this, products labeled both “eco-friendly” and “genetically modified” could become...
