Marsh John E, Hughes Robert W, Jones Dylan M
School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK.
Cognition. 2009 Jan;110(1):23-38. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2008.08.003. Epub 2008 Dec 10.
Distraction by irrelevant background sound of visually-based cognitive tasks illustrates the vulnerability of attentional selectivity across modalities. Four experiments centred on auditory distraction during tests of memory for visually-presented semantic information. Meaningful irrelevant speech disrupted the free recall of semantic category-exemplars more than meaningless irrelevant sound (Experiment 1). This effect was exacerbated when the irrelevant speech was semantically related to the to-be-remembered material (Experiment 2). Importantly, however, these effects of meaningfulness and semantic relatedness were shown to arise only when instructions emphasized recall by category rather than by serial order (Experiments 3 and 4). The results favor a process-oriented, rather than a structural, approach to the breakdown of attentional selectivity and forgetting: performance is impaired by the similarity of process brought to bear on the relevant and irrelevant material, not the similarity in item content.
基于视觉的认知任务中，不相关背景声音的干扰说明了跨模态注意力选择性的脆弱性。四项实验聚焦于视觉呈现语义信息记忆测试中的听觉干扰。有意义的不相关言语比无意义的不相关声音更能干扰语义类别示例的自由回忆（实验1）。当不相关言语与待记忆材料语义相关时，这种效应会加剧（实验2）。然而，重要的是，只有当指令强调按类别而非按顺序回忆时，才有意义性和语义相关性的这些效应（实验3和实验4）。结果支持一种以过程为导向而非结构导向的注意力选择性和遗忘崩溃的方法：相关材料和不相关材料所涉及过程的相似性会损害表现，而非项目内容的相似性。
