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Retrieval from memory: vulnerable or inviolable?

Dylan M Jones1, John E Marsh, Robert W Hughes

  • 1School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom. jonesdm@cardiff.ac.uk

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition
|January 19, 2012
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

The mere presence of meaningful speech disrupts semantic memory retrieval, especially when the speech is semantically related. This finding highlights how auditory distractions impact lexical retrieval processes.

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Psycholinguistics

Background:

  • Auditory distractions, particularly speech, are known to affect cognitive performance.
  • Understanding the specific mechanisms of auditory distraction is crucial for cognitive science.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the impact of irrelevant speech on semantic memory retrieval.
  • To determine the role of speech meaningfulness and semantic relatedness in auditory distraction.
  • To differentiate the effects of auditory distraction on semantic versus phonemic fluency.

Main Methods:

  • Participants performed semantic fluency tasks (retrieving words from a category) and phonemic fluency tasks (retrieving words starting with a letter).
  • The presence of irrelevant speech (forward, reversed, meaningful, non-meaningful) was manipulated.
  • Semantic relatedness between irrelevant speech and retrieval cues was varied.

Main Results:

  • Meaningful irrelevant speech significantly impaired semantic fluency, unlike reversed speech or nonwords.
  • Semantically related speech caused greater disruption than unrelated speech.
  • Phonemic fluency was unaffected by meaningful speech but was impaired by phonemically related speech.

Conclusions:

  • Retrieval from semantic memory is highly sensitive to the properties of concurrent speech.
  • Auditory distraction in semantic tasks is not solely mediated by executive load but by interference related to the content of the speech.
  • The findings support an interference-by-process model of auditory distraction.