So glad you’re finding it helpful!! Stick with it 🎉💪

I’ll be here all week

(Yeah yeah it’s zero-inflated and the variance isn’t equal to the mean but shhhhhh conceptually)

☺️

Together, this series of experiments provides evidence that although subsequent noise may impair recall of previously-heard information, the effect of effortful listening on recall is transient and does not appear to influence retention of information presented minutes earlier.

This reanalysis revealed that the effects of noisy speech on previously-presented information were extremely short-lived, which explains why the effect would emerge for digit lists but not longer passages.

To help clarify the mechanisms through which noise might affect recall and how differences in the timescales of lists versus passages might influence these processes, we performed a reanalysis of our previous replication data (Guang et al., 2021).

In three experiments including a total of 450 participants, we found that noise in the second half of the passages did not impair retention of information in the first half, and in some cases even improved retention.

Here, we report three attempts to replicate an additional experiment in that classic paper that extended the finding from lists of digits to five-minute passages.

Our research group previously published a successful replication of Rabbitt’s seminal finding, which used lists of digits as the target stimuli (Guang et al., 2021).

This paradigm elegantly disentangled the effects of noise on speech identification from those on encoding: Because the changes in noise happened after the to-be-remembered items, differences in recall reflect the consequences of effortful listening rather than poor speech intelligibility.

In the first study of the relationship between effortful listening and recall, Rabbitt (1968) showed that memory for speech is poorer when it is followed by noise-masked speech than by unmasked speech.

I hope that in doing this measurement work and making everything publicly available, other researchers can use this paradigm to address other theoretical questions beyond the specific issues I focused on, and without being limited by the necessity to conduct research in person. Yay measurement!

The theoretical stuff is interesting, but I think more importantly, this study includes important psychometric experiments that 1) establish positive and negative control, 2) assess convergent validity and sensitivity relative to a commonly-used task, and 3) generate performance curves.

I replicate this finding multiple times within this study, and I show that it holds for isolated words as well as sentences. This work also shows that semantic context reduces dual-task costs, particularly in difficult listening conditions and for audiovisual speech.