Professorship of General Psychology

Irrelevant sounds impair the maintenance of relevant information in working memory. In a typical experiment, it is the task of the subjects to maintain a list of visually presented items for a short time and then to recall them in the order of their presentation. If auditory distractors are played during the presentation of the items, the probability of a correct recall is significantly lower compared to a quiet control condition. In this context, we are particularly interested in the psychoacoustic characteristics responsible for the disruptive effects and processing involved. To what extent can the processing of irrelevant language be suppressed? What role do cognitive factors play, such as the expected continuation of the distractor sequence? Do individual differences in working memory capacity influence the extent of the disruption?

The successful implementation of current tasks and goals requires paying attention to task-relevant information and ignoring task-irrelevant information. Extensive research has shown that elderly people often find it more difficult to suppress the processing of irrelevant information. While reading, for example, older subjects are more disturbed than younger subjects by interspersed unrelated distractor words, and they have greater difficulties in repeating a text when irrelevant words are presented through headphones at the same time. We aim to investigate whether a general deficit in inhibitory attention control is responsible for the age-related decrease in cognitive performance or whether modality and type of stimulus presentation play a role. In particular, we are interested in whether the ability to ignore distractor stimuli presented in a different modality than the target stimuli (e.g., visual and auditory) persists into old age.

Incidental or implicit learning is learning without the intention to do so. A very popular incidental learning phenomenon is the survival processing effect, which refers to the memory advantage for words that have been previously assessed in terms of their relevance for a fictional survival situation. Some researchers argue that this is evidence that the operating characteristics of memory continue to bear the imprints of ancestral selection pressure. Other researchers suggest that the survival processing memory effect and similar phenomena can be explained by general memory principles. In a series of experiments, we will put these two explanations to an empirical test.