Title of thesis: CAN IRRELEVANT ALTERNATIVES AFFECT PROBABILITY JUDGMENT? THE DISCRIMINATION BIAS Amber Sprenger, Master of Science, 2005 Thesis directed by: Professor Michael Dougherty Department of Psychology In this paper we used a proactive interference (PI) paradigm to examine the effect of generating irrelevant alternative hypotheses on probability judgments. Two possible effects of gener...

The claim that the sensitivity of free recall to disruption by irrelevant sound is a function of the extent to which rote rehearsal is employed as a mnemonic strategy was investigated in two experiments. The degree of disruption by irrelevant sound in terms of both item and order information was contrasted under serial and free recall instructions. Irrelevant sound was found to disrupt order an...

Selective visual attention enhances the processing of relevant stimuli and filters out irrelevant stimuli and/or distractors. However, irrelevant information is sometimes processed, as demonstrated by the Simon effect (Simon and Rudell, 1967). We examined whether fully irrelevant distractors (task and target-irrelevant) produce interference (measured as the Simon effect), and whether endogenous...

The effects of irrelevant speech were examined on a range of memory tasks. A missing-item task, which relied on a nonserial strategy for recall, proved less sensitive to the effects of irrelevant speech than one calling on memory for serial order. The finding that the effect of irrelevant speech both on a recognition task and on a paired-associates task was modified significantly by articulator...

Selective attention and interference from the irrelevant domain are frequently neglected factors in working memory experiments. Here identical stimuli were employed in n-back tasks under spatial and verbal task instructions to test whether information in the irrelevant domain was really irrelevant. The results reveal interference from the irrelevant domain in the replacement sub-process of the ...

Intertrial effects such as priming of pop-out (PoP) often occur for task-irrelevant dimensions as well as task-relevant dimensions, though to a weaker extent. Here we test the hypothesis that increased priming for task-relevant dimensions is due to greater passive build-up of priming for the task-relevant dimension rather than to an active filtering of task-irrelevant dimensions; if this is the...