Habituation of the irrelevant sound effect: evidence for an attentional theory of short-term memory disruption

Immediate serial recall is seriously disrupted by to-be-ignored sound. According to the embedded-processes model, auditory distractors elicit attentional orienting that draws processing resources away from the recall task. The model predicts that interference should be attenuated after repeated exposure to the auditory distractors. Previous failures to observe evidence for habituation can be explained by assuming that habituation to complex distractor features depends on the availability of working memory resources. Here we demonstrate that the irrelevant sound effect is attenuated after passive listening to the auditory distractors during a preexposure phase prior to the serial recall task. Experiment 1 shows that the irrelevant sound effect is abolished after 20 min of passive listening to the distractor speech. Experiments 2-4 show that irrelevant sound interference is significantly reduced after listening to distractors for 45 s. As predicted by the habituation hypothesis, an attenuation of interference occurs only when the distractor material matches the material played in the preexposure phase (Experiment 5). The results support an attentional conceptualization of the irrelevant sound effect.