Equivalent auditory distraction in children and adults

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Highlights

  • Previous studies on auditory distraction in children and adults yielded mixed results.

  • The auditory deviant effect has not been tested yet from a developmental perspective.

  • Third, fourth, and fifth graders were compared to younger adults and older adults.

  • We used both fixed and individual list lengths to equate difficulty across age groups.

  • Children and adults showed equivalent auditory deviant and changing state effects.

Abstract

There is an ongoing debate about whether children have more problems ignoring auditory distractors than adults. This is an important empirical question with direct implications for theories making predictions about the development of selective attention. In two experiments, the disruptive effect of to-be-ignored speech on short-term memory performance of third graders, fourth graders, fifth graders, younger adults, and older adults was examined. Three auditory conditions were compared: (a) steady state sequences in which the same distractor was repeated, (b) changing state sequences in which different distractors were presented, and (c) auditory deviant sequences in which a deviant distractor was presented in a sequence of repeated distractors. According to the attentional resource view, children should exhibit larger disruption by changing and deviant sounds due to their poorer attentional control abilities compared with adults. The duplex-mechanism account proposes that the auditory deviant effect is under attentional control, whereas the changing state effect is not, and thus predicts that children should be more susceptible to auditory deviants than adults but equally disrupted by changing state sequences. According to the renewed view of age-related distraction, there should be no age differences in cross-modal auditory distraction because some of the irrelevant auditory information can be filtered out early in the processing stream. Children and adults were equally disrupted by changing and deviant speech sounds regardless of whether task difficulty was equated between age groups or not. These results are consistent with the renewed view of age-related distraction.

Introduction

The amount of information that can be held in working memory is limited and increases until early adulthood (e.g., Fry & Hale, 1996). The presentation of irrelevant auditory information reduces working memory performance dramatically both in adults (Colle and Welsh, 1976, Salamé and Baddeley, 1982) and in children (Elliott, 2002, Klatte et al., 2010). Whether children are more vulnerable to auditory distraction than adults is subject to current debate (Elliott et al., 2016, Schwarz et al., 2015). This question has important consequences for theories making predictions about the development of selective attention and is also of practical relevance for the acoustic design of learning environments. Although it has been proposed that children are particularly susceptible to attentional capture (Hughes, 2014, Meinhardt-Injac et al., 2015, Schwarz et al., 2015), it has not yet been tested whether there are developmental differences in the disruption of serial recall by auditory deviant stimuli. The current experiments were designed to close this empirical gap.

To study the effects of auditory distraction on short-term memory performance, serial recall is used as the standard paradigm. In this task, a list of random digits is presented and participants are asked to recall the digits in the order of their presentation. Serial recall performance is markedly impaired when task-irrelevant sounds are played (Colle and Welsh, 1976, Parmentier and Beaman, 2015, Röer et al., 2015, Salamé and Baddeley, 1982, Schlittmeier et al., 2012, Wöstmann and Obleser, 2016). In the current study, we contrasted two types of auditory distraction: (a) the disruptive effect of changing distractor items (e.g., “a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h”) and (b) the destructive effect of auditory deviants (e.g., “a, a, a, a, a, b, a, a”). Disruption is typically measured relative to a steady state control condition (Hughes et al., 2007, Röer et al., 2015, Sörqvist, 2010) in which the same distractor item is presented repeatedly (e.g., “a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a”). This is what we did in the current study as well. The changing state effect is defined as the increase in disruption by changing state sequences relative to steady state sequences (cf. Hughes et al., 2005, Jones et al., 1992). The auditory deviant effect is defined as the increase in disruption by auditory deviant sequences relative to steady state sequences (cf. Hughes et al., 2005, Vachon et al., 2012).

Theoretically and empirically, the question of whether children should be particularly susceptible to the disruptive effect of changing and deviant speech sounds has not been finally resolved. We first turn to theories that make predictions about the development of selective attention. We subsequently give a short overview of the existing literature comparing auditory distraction in children and adults.

The attentional resource view (Dempster, 1992, Dempster, 1993) is based on the idea that the areas of the brain that take longest to mature during childhood are the first to show signs of brain aging. According to this “last in, first out” hypothesis of cognitive development, children and older adults should show worse performance than younger adults. Specifically, it has been proposed that both children and older adults have less well-functioning inhibitory attention mechanisms compared with younger adults, leading to increased disruption by task-irrelevant information. Due to this inefficiency, both children and older adults should be less able to ignore task-irrelevant background sounds than younger adults.

However, it has also been argued that developmental differences in the efficiency with which auditory distractors can be ignored should depend on the specific type of auditory distraction. Central to the duplex-mechanism account (Hughes, 2014) is the assumption that disruption by changing state sounds and disruption by auditory deviants are differentially affected by cognitive control processes. According to this theory, there are two distinct forms of auditory distraction. Changing state sounds disrupt serial recall because the irrelevant order information in the distractor sequence is processed preattentionally and interferes with the relevant order information in the item sequence. Auditory deviant sounds disrupt serial recall because they violate a recent auditory regularity, which produces attentional capture and draws processing resources away from the focal task. The changing state effect occurs automatically and cannot be controlled, whereas the auditory deviant effect is under attentional control (Hughes, Hurlstone, Marsh, Vachon, & Jones, 2013). It has been proposed that larger irrelevant speech effects in children as compared with adults (Elliott, 2002, Elliott and Briganti, 2012) may be “specifically attributable to increased susceptibility to attentional capture, not interference-by-process” (Hughes, 2014, p. 37). The duplex-mechanism account has been used to explain why children have sometimes been found to show larger auditory distraction than adults and sometimes not. For instance, Klatte, Lachmann, Schlittmeier, et al. (2010) suggested that “effects of irrelevant sounds on serial recall stem from two separate mechanisms: specific interference due to the sounds’ automatic access to short-term memory and/or attention capture. Only for the latter there is developmental change” (p. 1168). A strength of the duplex-mechanism account is that it has the potential to explain why there are conflicting findings in the literature. According to this view, the changing state effect should be stable across the lifespan, whereas the auditory deviant effect should be subject to developmental change. Correspondingly, older adults should show an increased auditory deviant effect due to age-related deficits in attentional control but should show an equivalent changing state effect compared with younger adults. The current series of experiments allowed us to test this proposed dissociation directly.

According to the renewed view of age-related distraction (Guerreiro, Murphy, & Van Gerven, 2010), there should be no differences in auditory distraction across age groups. Age-related changes in distractibility are assumed to depend on whether relevant information and irrelevant information are presented in the same modality or in different modalities and on the modality of the to-be-ignored information. Attentional selectivity across modalities (i.e., attending to the relevant modality and ignoring the irrelevant modality) is considerably easier to achieve compared with the discrimination of relevant and irrelevant information within the same modality; thus, differences in attentional control between younger and older adults should play only a minor role. Cross-modal distraction by irrelevant sound is assumed to be particularly immune to age-related differences because auditory information can be suppressed at both central and peripheral levels of the processing stream and, therefore, can be blocked off more efficiently than irrelevant visual information (Guerreiro et al., 2010). In consequence, the renewed view of age-related distraction predicts equivalent changing state and auditory deviant effects in children, younger adults, and older adults.

Several studies have looked into distraction by to-be-ignored auditory information in children (Elliott, 2002, Elliott et al., 2007, Elliott and Briganti, 2012, Elliott and Cowan, 2005, Elliott et al., 2016, Klatte et al., 2013, Klatte et al., 2010, Klatte et al., 2010, Schwarz et al., 2015, Wetzel, 2015, Wetzel and Schröger, 2007b). With regard to developmental differences in the disruption of short-term memory by irrelevant sound, however, no coherent pattern emerged. Some studies reported greater disruption in children than in adults (Elliott, 2002, Elliott and Briganti, 2012, Elliott et al., 2016), whereas others did not (Klatte et al., 2010, Schwarz et al., 2015); as a consequence, it remains an open empirical question whether the disruptive effects of changing and deviant sounds on serial recall differ between children and adults.1 Table 1 lists all studies we are aware of that directly addressed the question of whether there is developmental change in the disruption of short-term memory performance by auditory distractors.

Elliott (2002) compared the effects of irrelevant sound on serial recall of 8-, 9-, and 11-year-old children and adults. To equate the difficulty of the task across age groups, the lengths of the to-be-remembered lists were determined individually for each participant. List length increased with age, and the detrimental effect of changing state irrelevant sound relative to the steady state condition was larger in children than in adults. This was explained by assuming that a lack of attentional control is responsible for the disruption by irrelevant sound. Children have less attentional control than adults, which causes increased susceptibility to auditory distraction (cf. Elliott, 2002). The same pattern of results was reported in Experiment 3 of Elliott and Briganti (2012), who compared auditory distraction in 8-year-old children and adults. List length was again determined individually for the children. For adults, a fixed list length of seven digits was used. Auditory distractors were words, and the control condition was silence. In Experiment 1 of Elliott et al. (2016), list length was not determined individually. Children and adults received lists of four and eight digits, respectively. The authors were interested in possible developmental effects in the time course of auditory distraction. Overall, children showed a larger irrelevant sound effect than younger adults. The results suggest that developmental differences affect primarily the maintenance of the to-be-remembered items in working memory and not so much the encoding processes at the beginning of list presentation, although it should be noted that a direct comparison of the time course of auditory distraction across age groups is difficult because it is confounded by rehearsal time (e.g., children had only 6 s to rehearse the items in silence before auditory distractors were played, whereas adults had 12 s to rehearse the items in silence). In Experiment 2 of Elliott et al. (2016), the effects of steady state and changing state sound on two different tasks were examined: (a) the probed-order recall task and (b) the missing-item task. In both tasks, the presentation of the digits is similar to the standard serial recall task that is used in most experiments with the exception that participants are asked to name only one digit. In the probed-order recall task, participants are asked to name the digit that followed digit x, with x being a randomly chosen digit that was presented previously. In the missing-item task, a random sequence of all but one of the digits of a known reference set is presented and participants are asked to name the digit from the set that is missing. With regard to developmental differences in the disruption by irrelevant sound, however, an inconsistent pattern emerged. Elliott et al. (2016) reported larger disruption by irrelevant sound for the missing-item task in children than in adults, but they reported equivalent disruption in the probed-order recall task. The fact that children showed an irrelevant sound effect in both tasks, whereas adults showed an effect only in the probed-order recall task, was interpreted as evidence in favor of the duplex-mechanism account, according to which there are two types of auditory distraction: one that is subject to developmental change and one that is not.

Comparing serial recall of pictures between 7-year-old children and adults, Klatte, Lachmann, Schlittmeier, et al. (2010) found no evidence for developmental differences in the susceptibility to irrelevant sound. Adults were presented with seven pictures and children with four pictures. Adults wrote the ordinal number of the correct serial position next to the pictures, which were arranged randomly on the answer sheet. Children drew lines from numbered boxes to the pictures instead. No effect of age group was obtained when serial recall performance in the quiet condition was analyzed in terms of proportion correct, suggesting that the task was equally difficult in children and adults. What is more, the decrement in serial recall due to irrelevant speech did not differ statistically between age groups. This finding was confirmed in a second experiment in which the number of items corresponded to the individual memory span for the pictures obtained in quiet. Another study from the same lab using a serial recognition paradigm showed a similar pattern of results with equivalent irrelevant speech effects in 9-year-old children and adults (Schwarz et al., 2015). These results are consistent with results from the other end of the age spectrum. Despite a general decline in working memory capacity for older adults relative to younger adults, a number of studies found no evidence for age-related differences in the disruption of serial recall by changing sounds (Beaman, 2005, Bell and Buchner, 2007, Rouleau and Belleville, 1996) and deviant sounds (Röer et al., 2015).

However, not only is the overall pattern of results mixed, but also the results are difficult to interpret for several reasons. First, in many experiments, attempts were made to equate the level of difficulty of the serial recall task between age groups by requiring children to remember fewer items than younger adults. This procedure is intended to equate task difficulty between age groups because children are not able to hold as much information in mind as adults, which can be attributed, for example, to developmental changes in the accuracy of temporal encoding or retrieval processes (cf. McCormack, Brown, Vousden, & Henson, 2000). However, it may cause a problem when performance is analyzed in terms of proportion correct. To illustrate, let us assume that children and adults produce one more error in the presence of irrelevant sound relative to the control condition. Let us also assume that children and adults need to remember four and eight items, respectively. In this case, one additional error would correspond to a difference of .25 between the distractor condition and the control condition in the child group and to a difference of .125 in the adult group. If proportion correct is used as the dependent measure, it is possible to conclude that the size of the distraction effect is twice as large in children in comparison with older adults even though the difference in terms of the raw number of items is the same. Second, in some experiments, different materials and procedures were used for children and adults. In Klatte, Lachmann, Schlittmeier, et al. (2010), adults wrote the serial position on the answer sheet, whereas children drew lines from numbered boxes to pictures. In Experiment 1 of Elliott et al. (2016), the total number of trials was 36, each trial lasted 12 s, and the list length was four items in the child group, whereas the total number of trials was 60, each trial lasted 20 s, and the list length was eight items in the adult group. This might not be a serious problem, but avoiding any—even seemingly negligible—differences between groups seems preferable. Third, in some experiments (Elliott and Briganti, 2012, Elliott et al., 2016), only top performing children and adults were compared (i.e., children from magnet elementary schools who had passed a screening test for admission and the upper quartile of college students). Thus, it remains somewhat unclear to what extent these results can be transferred to the general population. Fourth, not all relevant experimental conditions have been compared directly. Most important, it has been proposed that children are as susceptible to the changing state effect as younger adults, whereas children should be particularly susceptible to disruption by auditory deviant stimuli (e.g., Klatte et al., 2013, Schwarz et al., 2015) that cause attentional capture. Some studies have indeed shown that children seem to be particularly prone to attentional capture (e.g., Wetzel & Schröger, 2007b), but overall those findings that were obtained in the auditory oddball paradigm are rather mixed. In a recent review on the development of involuntary attention mechanisms during childhood, Wetzel and Schröger (2014) summarized,

The few developmentally active distraction studies with typically developed children have apparently revealed inconsistent results. Some auditory oddball studies have reported decreasing distraction effects (difference in reaction time or hit rate between distracter and standard trial) with increasing age (Gumenyuk et al., 2004, Gumenyuk et al., 2001, Wetzel and Schröger, 2007a, Wetzel et al., 2006). Ruhnau, Wetzel, Widmann, and Schröger (2010) observed reduced distraction effects in 9- to 10-year-old children compared with adults. Other studies have not reported age-associated differences in behavioral distraction effects

(Horváth et al., 2009, Ruhnau et al., 2013, Wetzel et al., 2009). (p. 84)

Thus, it remains an open empirical question whether children show an increased auditory deviant effect on serial recall as compared with adults. In two experiments, we addressed this question directly using a standard serial recall task and standard distractor sequences, a within-participant manipulation of auditory condition, and two types of distraction that have been proposed to differ in their amenability to attentional control: the changing state effect and the auditory deviant effect. Three different groups of children (third graders, fourth graders, and fifth graders) were compared with younger adults. An additional older adult group was included in order to facilitate the comparison across a wide age spectrum and as a validity test of the current experiments. Because we already know that older adults do not differ from younger adults in the size of the changing state effect (Beaman, 2005, Bell and Buchner, 2007, Rouleau and Belleville, 1996) and the auditory deviant effect (Röer et al., 2015), the same age equivalence should be observed here as well.

The attentional resource view (Dempster, 1992, Dempster, 1993) predicts that children and older adults should be more disrupted by both changing and deviant speech sounds due to the generally poorer ability to inhibit task-irrelevant information of people in these age groups relative to younger adults. The duplex-mechanism account (Hughes, 2014) predicts that age-related deficits in attentional control should be associated with a more pronounced auditory deviant effect in children and older adults relative to younger adults, but the magnitude of the changing state effect should be equivalent across age groups. According to the renewed view of age-related distraction (Guerreiro et al., 2010), cross-modal auditory distraction by both changing state and deviant stimuli should not vary as a function of age because ignoring the auditory modality while attending to the visual modality is a very basic form of attentional control that can be assumed to be equally effective in children, younger adults, and older adults.

Section snippets

Participants

A total of 121 participants took part in this experiment. The sample consisted of 28 younger adults (21 women), 30 older adults (21 women), 28 fifth graders (14 girls), and 35 third graders (19 girls). Younger adults ranged in age from 19 to 32 years (M = 24.14 years, SD = 3.69) and were recruited at Heinrich Heine University. Older adults were mobile and independent (i.e., they lived in their own households and did not rely on external care) and were recruited through advertisements in local

Participants

A total of 68 participants took part in this experiment. The sample consisted of 38 younger adults (29 women) and 30 fourth graders (13 girls). Younger adults ranged in age from 18 to 38 years (M = 23.58 years, SD = 4.77) and were recruited at Heinrich Heine University. Fourth graders were 8–10 years old (M = 9.10 years, SD = 0.40). Children were recruited from a local school with the agreement of the principal and the teacher. Parental consent was obtained before the children were allowed to

General discussion

In two experiments, we tested whether third graders, fourth graders, and fifth graders are more susceptible to auditory distraction than adults. We found a typical changing state effect (i.e., larger disruption by changing sounds relative to repetitive sounds) and a typical auditory deviant effect (i.e., larger disruption by deviant sounds relative to repetitive sounds). From the outset, it was unclear whether there would be developmental change because some studies reported greater auditory

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