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

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, η2p = .02. The absence of an ISE in the spatial domain does not support the changing state hypothesis.