Loading...
The effect of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" on short-term memory
Author(s)
Date Issued
January 1, 2018
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Irrelevant speech effect (ISE) refers to the decrease in cognitive performance under the influence of a sound which is not related to the task. Typically, ISE has been quantified for speech noise by the rate of errors in recalling visually presented items (serial-recall task). Despite the limited effect size, non-speech sounds have also been shown to disrupt the short-term memory in serial-recall task, of which the spectro-temporal characteristics may easily be adjusted to investigate some aspects of ISE. In the current study, a well-known tune ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ was used to create a set of stimuli that differed in three factors: 1) Instrument type (played either on a MIDI piano or in pure tones); 2) number of notes per second (two or four); 3) playing order (original, reverse or random). The results showed some trends that the piano sound disrupts the task slightly more than the pure tone, and so does the four-note version than the two-note. When played in a random order, the error rate was higher than the original-/reverse-order versions, whereas the latter two conditions were almost equal. These trends may be explained in relation to the temporal and spectral variations between sound tokens.
Citation
Inter Noise 2018 47th International Congress and Exposition on Noise Control Engineering Impact of Noise Control Engineering, 2018