Neural Mechanisms of Involuntary Attention to Acoustic Novelty and Change

Abstract

Abstractn Behavioral and event-related brain potential (ERP) measures were used to elucidate the neural mechanisms of involuntary engagement of attention by novelty and change in the acoustic environment. The behavioral measures consisted of the reaction time (RT) and performance accuracy (hit rate) in a forcedchoice visual RT task where subjects were to discriminate between odd and even numbers. Each visual stimulus was preceded by an irrelevant auditory stimulus, which was randomly either a "standard" tone (80%), a slightly, higher "deviant" tone (10%), or a natural, "novel" sound (10%). Novel sounds prolonged the RT to successive visual stimuli by 17 msec as compared with the RT to visual stimuli that followed standard tones. Deviant tones, in turn, decreased the hit rate but did not signi cantly affect the RT. In the ERPs to deviant tones, the mismatch negativity (MMN), peaking at 150 msec, and a second negativity, peaking at 400 msec, could be observed. Novel sounds elicited an enhanced N1, with a probable overlap by the MMN, and a large positive P3a response with two different subcomponents: an early centrally dominant P3a, peaking at 230 msec, and a late P3a, peaking at 315 msec with a right-frontal scalp maximum. The present results suggest the involvement of two different neural mechanisms in triggering involuntary attention to acoustic novelty and change: a transient-detector mechanism activated by novel sounds and re ected in the N1 and a stimulus-change detector mechanism activated by deviant tones and novel sounds and re ected in the MMN. The observed differential distracting effects by slightly deviant tones and widely deviant novel sounds support the notion of two separate mechanisms of involuntary attention. n

Preparation interval and cue utilization in the prevention of distraction

“…The same pattern of results was found in a similar arrangement with auditory distracters and visual task-relevant stimuli (e.g. Escera et al, 1998;Escera, Yago, Alho, 2001;Yago, Corral, Escera, 2001). These ERPs are usually interpreted in terms of three distraction-related processing stages.…”

Knowledge of sequence structure prevents auditory distraction: An ERP study

“…P3a is generally assumed to reflect involuntary attention switching (Friedman et al, 2001;Polich, 2007), while RON is theorised to reflect the reorientation of attention to the original task (Schröger and Wolff, 1998a;Sussman et al, 2003). Similar results were found in auditory-visual paradigms in which targets were visual stimuli (e. g. odd or even numbers) and the distractors were sounds (Escera et al, 1998(Escera et al, , 2000(Escera et al, , 2001. Although the early studies using either auditory (Berti and Schröger, 2003;Schröger and Wolff, 1998a;Schröger and Wolff, 1998b) or auditory-visual (Escera et al, 1998(Escera et al, , 2000(Escera et al, , 2001 paradigms consistently found prolonged response times (RTs) and decreased accuracy, recent studies found abolished or even reversed behavioral effects (Li et al, 2013;Parmentier et al, 2010;SanMiguel, et al, 2010a;2010b;Wetzel et al, 2012).…”

Updating P300: An integrative theory of P3a and P3b

“…Debener et al, 2005;Escera et al, 1998;Goldstein et al, 2002). ERP and fMRI studies suggest that a frontal attention mechanism governs neural responsivity to novelty (Daffner et al, 2000a(Daffner et al, , 2000b(Daffner et al, , 2000cSuwazono et al, 2000), thereby implying top-down control (Bledowski et al, 2004a;Dien et al, 2004;Kiehl et al, 2005;Opitz et al, 1999;Opitz, 2003).…”