An experiment examined performance with sonifications—a general term for nonspeech auditory displays—as a function of working memory encoding and the demands of three different types of interference tasks. Participants encoded the sonifications as verbal representations, visuospatial images, or auditory images. After encoding, participants engaged in brief verbal, visuospatial, or auditory interference tasks before responding to point estimation queries about the sonifications. Results were expected to show selective impact on sonification task performance when the interference task demands matched the working memory encoding strategy, but instead a pattern of general working memory interference emerged in addition to auditory modal interference. In practical applications, results suggested that performance with auditory displays will be impacted by any interference task, though auditory tasks likely will cause more interference than verbal or visuospatial tasks.
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