Study title

The requirement to remember information in the presence of potentially distracting background sound is a common feature of everyday cognition. Such background sounds need not be loud to produce distraction: Laboratory studies show that sounds presented at the level of a whisper reduce cognitive efficiency dramatically. Physical changes within the sound disrupt serial short-term memory, such as those involved in remembering an unfamiliar telephone number. However, recent work has shown that other mental activities particularly those that require processing of meaning are susceptible to disruption, not from the sound's physical changes, but via its meaning. This project will study the effect of meaning further and distinguish between competing explanations of this effect. For example, the project investigates whether the effect of meaning arises because meaningful distracting material is suppressed (an effortful process making the content of the distracter more difficult to remember if it is later re-presented for future recall) or because similar meaning to the to-be-remembered material captures attention. The project will contribute to our understanding of distraction generally and will lead to a computational model of distraction-by-meaning. Implications for distraction in applied settings in which mental work is undertaken in conditions of background sound will also be addressed.