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Registered Replication Report: Testing Disruptive Effects of Irrelevant Speech on Visual-Spatial Working Memory Cover

Registered Replication Report: Testing Disruptive Effects of Irrelevant Speech on Visual-Spatial Working Memory

Journal of European Psychology Students

Volume 9 (2018): Issue 1

By: Tatiana Kvetnaya

Open Access

|Apr 2018

Abstract

A Partial Replication of “Functional Equivalence of Verbal and Spatial Information in Serial Short-Term Memory (Jones, Farrand, Stuart, & Morris, 1995; Experiment 4)”

The irrelevant speech effect (ISE)—the phenomenon that background speech impairs serial recall of visually presented material—has been widely used for examining the structure of short-term memory. In Experiment 4, Jones, Farrand, Stuart, and Morris (1995) employed the ISE to demonstrate that impairment of performance is determined by the changing-state characteristics of the material, rather than its modality of origin. The present study directly replicated the spatial condition of Experiment 4 with N = 40 German participants. In contrast to the original findings, no main effect of sound type was observed, F(2, 78) = 0.81, p = .450, η²_p = .02. The absence of an ISE in the spatial domain does not support the changing state hypothesis.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/jeps.450 | Journal eISSN: 2222-6931

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Language: English

Page range: 10 - 15

Published on: Apr 6, 2018

Published by: Ubiquity Press

In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services

Keywords:

irrelevant speech effect,

short-term memory,

visual-spatial memory,

changing state hypothesis,

replication study

© 2018 Tatiana Kvetnaya, published by Ubiquity Press
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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