Can synchronised tones facilitate immediate memory for printed lists?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In verbal list recall, adding features redundant with the ones to be recalled theoretically could assist recall, by providing additional retrieval cues, or it could impede recall, by draining attention away from the features to be recalled. We examined young adults' immediate memory of lists of printed digits when these lists were sometimes accompanied by synchronised, concurrent tones, one per digit. Unlike most previous irrelevant-sound effects, the tones were not asynchronous with the printed items, which can corrupt the episodic record, and did not repeat within a list. Memory of the melody might bring to mind the associated digits like lyrics in a song. Sometimes there were instructions to sing the digits covertly in the tone pitches. In three experiments, there was no evidence that these methods enhanced memory. Instead, there appeared to be a distraction effect from the synchronised tones, as in the irrelevant sound effect with asynchronised tones.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it