Biomedical subjects

C Philip Beaman

Publications and source records attributed to C Philip Beaman.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

A left-ear disadvantage for the presentation of irrelevant sound: manipulations of task requirements and changing state.

Three experiments attempted to clarify the effect of altering the spatial presentation of irrelevant auditory information. Previous research using serial recall tasks demonstrated a left-ear disadvantage for the presentation of irrelevant sounds (). Experiments 1 and 2 examined the effects of manipulating the location of irrelevant sound on either a mental arithmetic task () or a missing-item task (; Experiment 4). Experiment 3 altered the amount of change in the irrelevant stream to assess how this affected the level of interference elicited. Two prerequisites appear necessary to produce the left-ear disadvantage; the presence of ordered structural changes in the irrelevant sound and the requirement for serial order processing of the attended information. The existence of a left-ear disadvantage highlights the role of the right hemisphere in the obligatory processing of auditory information.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2006

The relationship between absolute and proportion scores of serial order memory: simulation predictions and empirical data.

The capability of a feature model of immediate memory (Naine, 1990; Neath, 2000) to predict and account for a relationship between absolute and proportion scoring of immediate serial recall when memory load is varied (the list-length effect, LLE) is examined. The model correctly predicts the novel finding of an LLE in immediate serial order memory similar to that observed with free recall and previously assumed to be attributable to the long-term memory component of that procedure (Glanzer, 1972). The usefulness of formal models as predictive tools and the continuity between short-term serial order and longer-term item memory are considered.

Attention↗

PubMed2004

The irrelevant sound phenomenon revisited: what role for working memory capacity?

High-span individuals (as measured by the operation span [OSPAN] technique) are less likely than low-span individuals to notice their own names in an unattended auditory stream (A. R. A. Conway, N. Cowan, & M. F. Bunting, 2001). The possibility that OSPAN accounts for individual differences in auditory distraction on an immediate recall test was examined. There was no evidence that high-OSPAN participants were more resistant to the disruption caused by irrelevant speech in serial or in free recall. Low-OSPAN participants did, however, make more semantically related intrusion errors from the irrelevant sound stream in a free recall test (Experiment 4). Results suggest that OSPAN mediates semantic components of auditory distraction dissociable from other aspects of the irrelevant sound effect.

Humans↗

PubMed2002

Why are we good at detecting cheaters? A reply to Fodor.

It is argued that the recent criticism by Fodor (Cognition 75 (2000) 29) of "cheater detection" in the Wason selection task is based upon a false presumption about what the task entails. Fodor compares two different ways of presenting the task, rather than two different task domains (social and non-social). Consequently, the conclusion that the selection task can tell us nothing about either the architecture or the history of cognition is invalid. Fodor's explanation of the Wason selection task is examined experimentally and compared to predictions derived from social contract theory (Cognition 31 (1989) 187). It is concluded that, although Fodor's variant of the Wason selection task improves performance, this improvement is independent of the task domain and is insufficient to account for the "cheater detection" effect.

Attention↗

PubMed2002

Inverting the modality effect in serial recall.

Differences in recall ability between immediate serial recall of auditorily and visually presented verbal material have traditionally been considered restricted to the end of to-be-recalled lists, the recency section of the serial position curve (e.g., Crowder & Morton, 1969). Later studies showed that--under certain circumstances--differences in recall between the two modalities can be observed across the whole of the list (Frankish, 1985). However in all these studies the advantage observed is for recall of material presented in the auditorily modality. Six separate conditions across four experiments demonstrate that a visual advantage can be obtained with serial recall if participants are required to recall the list in two distinct sections using serial recall. Judged on a list-wide basis, the visual advantage is of equivalent size to the auditory advantage of the classical modality effect. The results demonstrate that differences in representation of auditory and visual verbal material in short-term memory persist beyond lexical and phonological categorization and are problematic for current theories of the modality effect.

Adult↗

PubMed2002

Auditory memory and the irrelevant sound effect: Further evidence for changing-state disruption.

Four experiments investigate the hypothesis that irrelevant sound interferes with serial recall of auditory items in the same fashion as with visually presented items. In Experiment 1 an acoustically changing sequence of 30 irrelevant utterances was more disruptive than 30 repetitions of the same utterance (the changing-state effect; Jones, Madden, & Miles, 1992) whether the to-be-remembered items were visually or auditorily presented. Experiment 2 showed that two different utterances spoken once (a heterogeneous compound suffix; LeCompte & Watkins, 1995) produced less disruption to serial recall than 15 repetitions of the same sequence. Disruption thus depends on the number of sounds in the irrelevant sequence. In Experiments 3a and 3b the number of different sounds, the "token-set" size (Tremblay & Jones, 1998), in an irrelevant sequence also influenced the magnitude of disruption in both irrelevant sound and compound suffix conditions. The results support the view that the disruption of memory for auditory items, like memory for visually presented items, is dependent on the number of different irrelevant sounds presented and the size of the set from which these sounds are taken. Theoretical implications are discussed.

Acoustic Stimulation↗