According to Murphy, Fraenkel, and Dalton (345), irrelevant distractors are produced based on the perceptual load of the delegated tasks. Most studies limit the information to the perceptual demands found in hearing. The article thus attempts to provide extensive research and experiments using various load manipulations to measure the level of distractor processing through an awareness and response competition report. The four experiments utilized in the study do not support the duty of personal loads in determining auditory attention. This summary delivers the essential elements and recommendations of the research provided by Sandra Murphy, Nick Fraenkel, and Polly Dalton that perceptual loads do not affect distractor processing.
The writers propose that the hearing system can selectively process sounds streams as well as the surplus capacity of other streams regardless of the perceptual loads in the system. Their experiments accord with the auditory modality theory that behaves like a warning model in detecting discrepancies in the auditory scene even though the perceptual demands are high (Murphy, Fraenkel, and Dalton, 346). The authors’ deductions raise queries regarding the techniques that can handle perceptual loads in hearing and vision. The load notion focused on vision suggests that perception is only selective if the role is too demanding such that it exhausts the capacity. The allocation of processors in the auditory system proceeds with a lot of flexibility. The capacity is never delegated in full rather it is managed in a voluntary manner. Therefore, the hearing system has more capability than vision to retain more capacity (Murphy, Fraenkel, and Dalton, 354). The phenomenon provides a mechanism that processes distractors together with the on-going tasks regardless of the demands that they present.
Work Cited
Murphy, Sandra; Fraenkel, Nick, and Dalton, Poly. Perceptual load does not modulate auditory distractor processing. London: Elsevier Publishing, 2013.
