The duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction has been extended to predict that people should have metacognitive awareness of the disruptive effect of auditory deviants on cognitive performance but little to no such awareness of the disruptive effect of changing-state relative to steady-state auditory distractors. To test this prediction, we assessed different types of metacognitive judgments about the disruptive effects of auditory-deviant, changing-state, and steady-state distractor sequences on serial recall. In a questionnaire, participants read about an irrelevant-speech experiment and were asked to provide metacognitive beliefs about how serial-recall performance would be affected by the different types of distractors. Another sample of participants heard the auditory distractors before predicting how their own serial-recall performance would suffer or benefit from the distractors. After participants had experienced the disruptive effects of the distractor sequences first hand, they were asked to make episodic retrospective judgments about how they thought the distractor sequences had affected their performance. The results consistently show that people are, on average, well aware of the greater disruptive effect of deviant and changing-state relative to steady-state distractors. Irrespective of condition, prospective and retrospective judgments of distraction were poor predictors of the individual susceptibility to distraction. These findings suggest that phenomena of auditory distraction cannot be categorized in two separate classes based on metacognitive awareness.

听觉分心的双重机制解释已经扩展到预测人们应该对听觉偏差对认知表现的破坏性影响有元认知意识，但对变化状态相对于稳态听觉分心物的破坏性影响几乎没有这种意识. 为了检验这一预测，我们评估了不同类型的元认知判断，这些判断是关于听觉异常、变化状态和稳态干扰序列对连续回忆的破坏性影响。在一份问卷中，参与者阅读了一项无关语音的实验，并被要求提供元认知信念，说明不同类型的干扰物如何影响连续回忆的表现。另一个参与者样本在预测他们自己的连续回忆表现将如何受到干扰或从干扰中受益之前听到了听觉干扰。在参与者亲身体验了干扰序列的破坏性影响后，他们被要求对他们认为干扰序列如何影响他们的表现做出不定期的回顾性判断。结果一致表明，相对于稳态干扰因素，人们平均而言非常清楚异常和变化状态的更大破坏性影响。无论条件如何，对分心的前瞻性和回顾性判断都不能很好地预测个体对分心的敏感性。