Röer Jan P, Körner Ulrike, Buchner Axel, Bell Raoul
Department of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf.
Emotion. 2017 Jun;17(4):740-750. doi: 10.1037/emo0000274. Epub 2017 Jan 12.
It is well established that task-irrelevant, to-be-ignored speech adversely affects serial short-term memory (STM) for visually presented items compared with a quiet control condition. However, there is an ongoing debate about whether the semantic content of the speech has the capacity to capture attention and to disrupt memory performance. In the present article, we tested whether taboo words are more difficult to ignore than neutral words. Taboo words or neutral words were presented as (a) steady state sequences in which the same distractor word was repeated, (b) changing state sequences in which different distractor words were presented, and (c) auditory deviant sequences in which a single distractor word deviated from a sequence of repeated words. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that taboo words disrupted performance more than neutral words. This taboo effect did not habituate and it did not differ between individuals with high and low working memory capacity. In Experiments 3 and 4, in which only a single deviant taboo word was presented, no taboo effect was obtained. These results do not support the idea that the processing of the auditory distractors' semantic content is the result of occasional attention switches to the auditory modality. Instead, the overall pattern of results is more in line with a functional view of auditory distraction, according to which the to-be-ignored modality is routinely monitored for potentially important stimuli (e.g., self-relevant or threatening information), the detection of which draws processing resources away from the primary task. (PsycINFO Database Record
与安静的对照条件相比，与任务无关、需被忽略的言语会对视觉呈现项目的系列短时记忆（STM）产生不利影响，这一点已得到充分证实。然而，关于言语的语义内容是否有能力吸引注意力并干扰记忆表现，目前仍存在争议。在本文中，我们测试了禁忌词是否比中性词更难被忽略。禁忌词或中性词以以下方式呈现：（a）稳态序列，其中重复呈现相同的干扰词；（b）变化状态序列，其中呈现不同的干扰词；（c）听觉偏差序列，其中单个干扰词与重复词序列不同。实验1和实验2表明，禁忌词比中性词对表现的干扰更大。这种禁忌效应不会产生习惯化，并且在工作记忆容量高和低的个体之间没有差异。在实验3和实验4中，仅呈现单个偏差禁忌词，未获得禁忌效应。这些结果不支持这样的观点，即对听觉干扰项语义内容的加工是偶尔将注意力转向听觉通道的结果。相反，结果的整体模式更符合听觉干扰的功能观点，根据这一观点，会对需被忽略的通道进行常规监测，以寻找潜在的重要刺激（例如，与自我相关或有威胁性的信息），对这些信息的检测会使加工资源从主要任务中转移出来。（PsycINFO数据库记录）
