Irrelevant Tapping and the Acoustic Confusion Effect
The Effect of Spatial Complexity
Abstract
When items in a to-be-remembered list sound similar, recall performance is worse than when items are acoustically distinct, what is known as the acoustic confusion effect (ACE). When participants are asked to tap a syncopated rhythm during list presentation, the difference between the acoustically similar and dissimilar conditions is abolished; however, simple temporal and simple spatial tapping tasks have no effect. The objective of the present study is to examine whether spatial complexity is a property of the tapping task that interferes with the ACE. Participants were asked to tap a simple (Experiment 1) or a complex spatial pattern (Experiment 2) at a regular pace during a verbal serial recall task in which acoustic similarity was manipulated. The results showed that simple spatial tapping had no effect on the ACE, whereas complex spatial tapping significantly reduced the effect. Implications for three theories of memory are discussed.
References
(2002). Insensitivity of visual short-term memory to irrelevant visual information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Experimental Psychology, 55A, 753–774.
(1966). Short-term memory for word sequences as a function of acoustic, semantic and formal similarity. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Experimental Psychology, 18A, 362–365.
(1986). Working memory. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.
(2003). Working memory: Looking back and looking forward. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4, 829–839.
(1984). Exploring the articulatory loop. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Experimental Psychology, 36A, 233–252.
(1976). Acoustic masking in primary memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 15, 17–31.
(1993). Effect of phonological similarity and concurrent irrelevant articulation on short-term-memory recall of repeated and novel word lists. Memory & Cognition, 21, 539–545.
(1964). Acoustic confusions in immediate memory. British Journal of Psychology, 55, 75–84.
(2008). Revisiting evidence for modularity and functional equivalence across verbal and spatial domains in memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34, 556–569.
(2003). Selective interference with verbal short-term memory for serial order information: A new paradigm and tests of a timing-signal hypothesis. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 56A, 1307–1334.
(1995). Functional equivalence of verbal and spatial information in serial short-term memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 1008–1018.
(2006). Perceptual organization masquerading as phonological storage: Further support for a perceptual-gestural view of short-term memory. Journal of Memory and Language, 54, 265–281.
(1993). Irrelevant tones produce an irrelevant speech effect: Implications for phonological coding in working memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 19(2), 369–381.
(2004). The phonological store of working memory: Is it phonological and is it a store? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30, 656–674.
(2001). Complexity effects in visuo-spatial working memory: Implications for the role of long-term memory. Memory, 9, 13–27.
(2004). Double dissociations in visual and spatial short-term memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 355–381.
(2003). Disruption of verbal STM by irrelevant speech, articulatory suppression, and manual tapping: Do they have a common source? The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 56A, 1249–1268.
(2000). Phonological similarity and the irrelevant speech effect: Implications for models of short-term verbal memory. Memory, 8, 145–157.
(1997). Irrelevant speech and irrelevant tones: The relative importance of speech to the irrelevant speech effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23, 472–483.
(1993). Articulatory rehearsal and phonological storage in working memory. Memory & Cognition, 21, 11–22.
(1999). Working memory and changing-state hypothesis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 25, 1272–1299.
(1967). The role of speech responses in short-term memory. Canadian Journal of Psychology, 21, 263–276.
(1990). A feature model of immediate memory. Memory & Cognition, 18, 251–269.
(2007). Age and redintegration in immediate memory and their relationship with task difficulty. Memory & Cognition, 35, 1940–1953.
(2000). Modeling the effects of irrelevant speech on memory. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 7, 403–423.
(1993). The disappearance of phonological similarity effect by complex rhythmic tapping. Psychologia, 36, 27–33.
(1994). What effect can rhythmic finger tapping have on the phonological similarity effect? Memory & Cognition, 22, 181–187.
(1997). When articulatory suppression does not suppress the activity of the phonological loop. British Journal of Psychology, 88, 565–578.
(2008). Directly assessing the relationship between irrelevant speech and irrelevant tapping. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology/Revue Canadienne de Psychologie Expérimentale, 62, 141–149.
(2003). Spatio-temporal working-memory and short-term object-location tasks use different memory mechanisms. Acta Psychologica, 114, 41–65.
