Distraction by Auditory Novelty
The Course and Aftermath of Novelty and Semantic Effects
Abstract
The unexpected occurrence of an oddball auditory stimulus (novel) among an otherwise repeated stream of sounds (standards) is known to impact negatively on participants’ performance in an unrelated visual task. The present study sought to test new predictions emerging from Parmentier’s (2008) model of distraction by auditory novelty. Participants categorized the direction of visual arrows preceded by a task-irrelevant sound. Two time intervals between distractor and target were tested in separate blocks of trials. Rare auditory novels consisted of the words “left” or “right”, which were either congruent or incongruent with the upcoming target. The data confirmed the slowing of response in the face of a novel (novelty distraction) as well as, on incongruent trials, a further delay due to cross-talk interference between distractor and target (semantic effect). More importantly, and in line with our predictions, the results further showed that (1) the semantic effect, but not novelty distraction, increased with the time interval between distractor and target; and that (2) the production of a response on the first standard trial following a novel trial was slowed if that response required the activation of a recently inhibited network (post-novelty semantic effect). Overall, the data lend support to the view that behavioral distraction by auditory novelty reflects a mosaic of contributors, the effects of which can ripple across trials.
References
1998). Processing of novel sounds and frequency changes in the human auditory cortex: Magnetoencephalographic recordings. Psychophysiology, 35, 211–224.
(2000). Task-switching, stimulus-response bindings, and negative priming. In , Control of cognitive processes. Attention and performance XVIII. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
(2006). The effect of age on the involuntary capture of attention by irrelevant sounds: A test of the frontal hypothesis of aging. Neuropsychologia, 44, 2564–2568.
(2000). Executive control in set switching: Residual switch cost and task-set inhibition. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 54, 33–41.
(2006). Task switching and novelty processing activate a common neural network for cognitive control. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 1734–1748.
(2008). Cognitive control after distraction: Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) dissociate between different processes of attentional allocation. Psychophysiology, 45, 608–620.
(2004). Bottom-up influences on working memory: Behavioral and electrophysiological distraction varies with distractor strength. Experimental Psychology, 51, 249–257.
(2001). A comparison of auditory and visual distraction: Behavioral and event-related indices. Cognitive Brain Research, 10, 265–273.
(2003). Auditory, visual, and cross-modal negative priming. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10, 917–923.
(1998). The counting stroop: An interference task specialized for functional neuroimaging – validation study with functional MRI. Human Brain Mapping, 6, 270–282.
(2001). Habituation to auditory distractors in a cross-modal, color-word interference task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 27, 654–667.
(1998). The nature of cross-modal color-word interference effects. Perception & Psychophysics, 60, 761–767.
(1974). Effects of noise letters upon the identification of a target letter in a nonsearch task. Perception & Psychophysics, 16, 143–149.
(1998). Neural mechanisms of involuntary attention to acoustic novelty and change. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 10, 590–604.
(2002). An electrophysiological and behavioral investigation of involuntary attention towards auditory frequency, duration and intensity changes. Cognitive Brain Research, 14, 325–332.
(2003). Cognitive and brain consequences of conflict. Neuroimage, 18, 42–57.
(2007). Response anticipation and response conflict: An event-related potential and functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Journal of Neuroscience, 28, 2272–2282.
(1995). Negative priming from ignored distractors in visual selection: A review. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2, 145–173.
(2001). The novelty P3: An event-related brain potential (ERP) sign of the brain’s evaluation of novelty. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 25, 355–373.
(2003). Developmental change in the cross-modal Stroop effect. Perception & Psychophysics, 65, 359–366.
(1994). A model of inhibitory mechanisms in selective attention. In , Inhibitory processes in attention, memory, and language (pp. 53–112). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
(1996). Effects of ethanol and auditory distraction on forced choice reaction time. Alcohol, 13, 153–156.
(2009). Why do we slow down after an error? Mechanisms underlying the effects of posterior slowing. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62, 209–218.
(2006). Evidence of task-specific resolution of response conflict. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 13, 800–806.
(1999). Response repetition benefits and costs. Acta Psychologica, 103, 295–310.
(1995). Stimulus-response compatibility with relevant and irrelevant stimulus dimensions that do and do not overlap with the response. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 21, 855–875.
(2003). Sequential modulations of stimulus-response correspondence effects depend on awareness of response conflict. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 10, 198–205.
(1968). Information theory of choice reaction times. London: Academic Press.
(2000). Dissociating the role of the dorsolateral prefrontal and anterior cingulated cortex in cognitive control. Science, 288, 1835–1838.
(1991). Half a century of research on the Stroop effect: An integrative review. Psychological Bulletin, 109, 163–203.
(1995). Determinants of negative priming. Psychological Bulletin, 118, 35–54.
(2007). Negative priming as a memory phenomenon. Journal of Psychology, 215, 35–51.
(2000). Changing internal constraints on action: The role of backward inhibition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 4–26.
(2008). Decomposing interference during Stroop performance into different conflict factors: An event-related fMRI study. Cortex, 45, 189–200.
(2006). Examining task-dependencies of different attentional processes as reflected in the P3a and reorienting negativity components of the human event-related brain potential. Neuroscience Letters, 396, 177–181.
(1990). The role of attention in auditory information processing as revealed by event-related potentials and other brain measures of cognitive function. Behavioral and Brain Science, 13, 201–288.
(1995). Selective attention and the inhibitory control of cognition. In , Interference ad inhibition in cognition (pp. 207–162). San Diego: Academic Press.
(1992). Persistence of negative priming: II. Evidence for episodic trace retrieval. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 18, 993–1000.
(2009). Post-error slowing: An orienting account. Cognition, 111, 275–279.
(2002). Differential contribution of frontal and temporal cortices to auditory change detection: fMRI and ERP results. NeuroImage, 15, 165–174.
(2008). Towards a cognitive model of distraction by auditory novels: The role of involuntary attention capture and semantic processing. Cognition, 109, 345–362.
(2010). The involuntary capture of attention by sound: Novelty and post-novelty distraction in young and older adults. Experimental Psychology, 57, 68–76.
(2008). The cognitive locus of distraction by acoustic novelty in the cross-modal oddball task. Cognition, 106, 408–432.
(2010). Behavioral distraction by auditory novelty is not only about novelty: The role of the distractor’s informational value. Cognition. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2010.03.002.
(2010). The involuntary capture of attention by novel feature pairings: A study of voice-location integration in auditory sensory memory. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 72, 279–284.
(2001). Brain reflections of words and their meaning. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5, 517–524.
(1966). Errors and error correction in choice-response tasks. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71, 264–272.
(2003). Auditory distraction with different presentation rates: An even-related potential and behavioral study. Clinical Neurophysiology, 114, 341–349.
(2005). Response repetition vs. response change modulates behavioral and electrophysiological effects of distraction. Cognitive Brain Research, 22, 451–456.
(2005). The visual-auditory color-word Stroop asymmetry and its time course. Memory & Cognition, 33, 1325–1336.
(1995). The cost of a predictable switch between simple cognitive tasks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 124, 207–231.
(1997). On the detection of auditory deviations: A pre-attentive activation model. Psychophysiology, 34, 245–257.
(1998). Attentional orienting and reorienting is indicated by human event-related brain potentials. NeuroReport, 9, 3355–3358.
(2004). Distributed neuronal networks for encoding category-specific semantic information: The mismatch negativity to action words. European Journal of Neuroscience, 19, 1083–1092.
(1969). Reactions toward the source of stimulation. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 81, 174–176.
(1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18, 643–662.
(2001). Does negative priming reflect inhibitory mechanisms? A review and integration of conflicting views. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 54, 321–343.
(2001). Subprocesses of performance monitoring: A dissociation of error processing and response competition revealed by event-related fMRI and ERPs. Neuroimage, 14, 1387–1401.
(2005). Separating semantic conflict and response conflict in the Stroop task: A functional MRI study. Neuroimage, 27, 497–504.
(2003). Task-switching and long-term priming: Role of episodic stimulus-task bindings in task-shift costs. Cognitive Psychology, 46, 361–413.
(1992). Auditory selective attention in middleaged and elderly subjects: An event-related brain potential study. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 84, 456–468.
(2004). The neural basis of error detection: Conflict monitoring and the error-related negativity. Psychological Review, 111, 939–959.
(