Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

5-2013

Abstract

The literature on directed forgetting has employed exclusively visual words. Thus, the potentially interesting aspects of a spoken utterance, which include not only vocal cues (e.g., prosody) but also the speaker and the listener, have been neglected. This study demonstrates that prosody alone does not influence directed-forgetting effects, while the sex of the speaker and the listener significantly modulate directed-forgetting effects for spoken utterances. Specifically, forgetting costs were attenuated for female-spoken items compared to male-spoken items, and forgetting benefits were eliminated among female listeners but not among male listeners. These results suggest that information conveyed in a female voice draws attention to its distinct perceptual attributes, thus interfering with retention of the semantic meaning, while female listeners' superior capacity for processing the surface features of spoken utterances may predispose them to spontaneously employ adaptive strategies to retain content information despite distraction by perceptual features. Our findings underscore the importance of sex differences when processing spoken messages in directed forgetting.

Keywords

Directed forgetting, prosody, gender, sex differences, female voice

Discipline

Applied Behavior Analysis | Social Psychology

Research Areas

Psychology

Publication

PLoS One

Volume

8

Issue

5

First Page

1

Last Page

9

ISSN

1932-6203

Identifier

10.1371/journal.pone.0064030

Publisher

Public Library of Science

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0064030

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