Dynamic Cognitive Control of Irrelevant Sound: Increased Task Engagement Attenuates Semantic Auditory Distraction

Two experiments investigated reactive top-down cognitive control of the detrimental influence of spoken distractors semantically related to words presented visually for free recall. Experiment 1 demonstrated that an increase in focal-task engagement-promoted experimentally by reducing the perceptual discriminability of the visual target words-eliminated the disruption by such distractors of veridical recall and also attenuated the erroneous recall of the distractors. A recall instruction that eliminates the requirement for output monitoring was used in Experiment 2 to investigate whether increased task engagement shields against distraction through a change in output-monitoring processes (back-end control) or by affecting the processing of the distractors during their presentation (front-end control). Rates of erroneous distractor recall were much greater than in Experiment 1, but both erroneous distractor recall and the disruptive effect of distractors on veridical recall were still attenuated under reduced target-word discriminability. Taken together, the results show that task engagement is under dynamic strategic control and can be modulated to shield against auditory distraction by attenuating distractor processing at encoding, thereby preventing distractors from coming to mind at test.