Don’t talk to me! Relevant sound disrupts visual search, irrelevant sound does not

Visual search experiments are usually conducted in quiet environments to ensure that participants can fully concentrate on the task. The real world, however, is rarely as quiet as the laboratory. We are more or less constantly exposed to auditory information, some of which we choose to attend to, some of which we try our best to ignore. In three experiments, we examined the effects of background sound on visual search. We used the Multi-Item LOcalization (MILO) task, in which participants clicked through items labeled 1-8 in numerical order as quickly as possible while hearing auditory information through headphones. In Experiment 1, participants needed to engage with the auditory information. In the “listening” condition, participants listened to a news report while performing the MILO task. They were subsequently quizzed about the news. In the “counting” condition, participants counted how many times a specific number was mentioned during a sports commentary. Both conditions significantly disrupted visual search performance compared to a quiet control condition. In Experiment 2, auditory distractors were meaningless sequences of random words that had previously been shown to disrupt visual-verbal working memory. Participants were informed that any background sound was irrelevant and asked to ignore it. It appears that they were able to do so, because there was no effect of auditory distraction on visual search performance. In Experiment 3, we increased the difficulty of the search task by using a “shuffle” manipulation in which the subsequent items in a sequence were randomly repositioned after each localizing response. Even so, search performance again proved to be robust against irrelevant sound. The overall pattern of results suggests that visual search performance can be effectively shielded from auditory distraction, but only if we can choose to ignore the sound and not if we actively listen to it.