The Impact of Interstimulus Interval and Background Silence on Recall

Three experiments investigate how the interval between target items of informa-tion in an audio context influences recall under background conditions of music and silence. In experiment 1, when a goal-directed learning task encouraged allocation of resources to the message, recall increased linearly for both back-ground conditions as the interval increased. However, under the incidental learn-ing task used in experiment 2, increasing the interval from two to three seconds had a deleterious impact on recall, but only in the background silence condition. Experiment 3 suggested that this was due to a surplus of cognitive resources in the background silence condition producing interfering extracommunication thought. Results also support the theory presented that background music bor-rows resources from the processing of message information in an incidental learning task. Although music impairs processing of brand information and re-duces recall at shorter intervals, relative to silence, it increases the interval preced-ing the onset of excess resources, delaying interfering thought. One of the goals of most advertising is to achieve a high level of information retention. Although much