Irrelevant, Irrelevant, Irrelevant! Time to change our approach to research?

Our Irrelevant Right to Health Care

Is Task-Irrelevant Learning Really Task-Irrelevant?

In the present study we address the question of whether the learning of task-irrelevant stimuli found in the paradigm of task-irrelevant learning (TIPL) [1]-[9] is truly task irrelevant. To test the hypothesis that associations that are beneficial to task-performance may develop between the task-relevant and task-irrelevant stimuli, or the task-responses and the task-irrelevant stimuli, we desi...

Irrelevant Alternatives *

This paper examines the notion of ‘irrelevant’alternatives in the context of social choice problems. It is shown that seemingly irrelevant alternatives could be relevant because of their information content. This leads to a consideration of aggregation rules where an endogenous condition of independence of irrelevant alternatives is imposed. The analysis leads to the characterization of a uniqu...

Directly assessing the relationship between irrelevant speech and irrelevant tapping.

The acoustic confusion effect is the finding that lists of to-be-remembered items that sound similar to one another are recalled worse than otherwise comparable lists of items that sound different. Previous work has shown that concurrent irrelevant speech and concurrent irrelevant tapping both reduce the size of this effect, suggesting similarities between the two manipulations. The authors ass...

Failures to Ignore Entirely Irrelevant Distractors

In daily life (e.g., in the work environment) people are often distracted by stimuli that are clearly irrelevant to the current task and should be ignored. In contrast, much applied distraction research has focused on task interruptions by information that requires a response and therefore cannot be ignored. Moreover, the most commonly used laboratory measures of distractibility (e.g., in the r...