Distraction and originality in word associations

Abstract

Two types of auditory distraction were employed during a word-association task: A distractor to be ignored (inhibition distractor) and a distractor to be attended to (vigilance distractor). A control group received no distraction. Houston and Jones (1967) presented evidence that the presence of an inhibition distractor improved performance on a task postulated to involve inhibition. If originality in word associations involves the inhibition of more probable common responses, any manipulation (inhibition distractor) which increases inhibition facility should increase originality and/or decrease the latency of original responses. This study found no such effect with respect to the originality of responses. Latency of response yielded a marginal effect in the predicted direction. The results are discussed in terms of the similarity of experimental tasks and measures between this study and the one by Houston and Jones.