Turoman and Vergauwe evaluate what sorts of experiences we find most distracting. They report that they “examined the effects of the task relevance and multisensory nature of distractors on working memory performance under high and low memory load. . . . we found conclusive evidence against a difference in how unisensory and multisensory distractors affected working memory performance. . . . when distractors were made partly task relevant . . . multisensory distractors disrupted working memory performance more than unisensory distractors on average. . . . multisensory distractors were actually only more disruptive than auditory distractors, and similarly as disruptive as visual distractors. Thus, overall, there was no strong evidence for multisensory distractors being more disruptive to working memory performance than unisensory distractors.”
Nora Turoman and Evie Vergauwe. “The Effect of Multisensory Distraction on Working Memory: A Role for Task Relevance? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, in press, https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001323