The role of auditory transient and deviance processing in distraction of task performance: a combined behavioral and event-related brain potential study

Abstract

Distraction of goal-oriented performance by a sudden change in the auditory environment is an everyday life experience. Different types of changes can be distracting, including a sudden onset of a transient sound and a slight deviation of otherwise regular auditory background stimulation. With regard to deviance detection, it is assumed that slight changes in a continuous sequence of auditory stimuli are detected by a predictive coding mechanisms and it has been demonstrated that this mechanism is capable of distracting ongoing task performance. In contrast, it is open whether transient detection—which does not rely on predictive coding mechanisms—can trigger behavioral distraction, too. In the present study, the effect of rare auditory changes on visual task performance is tested in an auditory-visual cross-modal distraction paradigm. The rare changes are either embedded within a continuous standard stimulation (triggering deviance detection) or are presented within an otherwise silent situation (triggering transient detection). In the event-related brain potentials, deviants elicited the mismatch negativity (MMN) while transients elicited an enhanced N1 component, mirroring pre-attentive change detection in both conditions but on the basis of different neuro-cognitive processes. These sensory components are followed by attention related ERP components including the P3a and the reorienting negativity (RON). This demonstrates that both types of changes trigger switches of attention. Finally, distraction of task performance is observable, too, but the impact of deviants is higher compared to transients. These findings suggest different routes of distraction allowing for the automatic processing of a wide range of potentially relevant changes in the environment as a pre-requisite for adaptive behavior.

The neuroergonomic evaluation of human machine interface design in air traffic control using behavioral and EEG/ERP measures

“…In this sense, several researches have shown that attentional resources are shared between vision and hearing [8][9][10][11]. Some authors also postulate that tasks with high cognitive load (e.g., load in working memory) can lead to a reduced openness to additional stimuli such as auditory distractors [12][13][14]. In line with these theories, we suggest that introducing efficient and salient visual designs that can reduce the perceptual and cognitive load is important not only to improve performance of the ATC task itself, but to also help preserve attentional resources that may potentially be required by other information channels.…”

“…When attentional focus deviates from the target detection task (e.g., in a dual task paradigm), the P300 amplitude decreases significantly [12,24,25]. P300 is also modulated by the load of the concurrent task as increases in memory load reduce P300 component size because task processing demands increase [26,27].…”

Exploiting temporal predictability: Event-related potential correlates of task-supportive temporal cue processing in auditory distraction

“…In some arrangements, task-irrelevant events cannot be disregarded at all: in a duration discrimination task (Schröger and Wolff, 1998b) the stimulus onset is a crucial reference point, and therefore even small deviations -for example, otherwise hardly noticeable (1%) pitch changes -occurring at the onset result in robust distraction effects (Berti, Roeber and Schröger, 2004). Recent behavioral studies, in which the separation of task-relevant andirrelevant events was manipulated, as well as whether the irrelevant event was followed by a relevant one on each trial, showed that the distraction-related response time delay was reduced when the foreperiod was not constant and the irrelevant event was unreliable (50% or less) in signaling the forthcoming task-relevant event (Berti, 2013;Jankowiak and Berti, 2007;Li, Parmentier and Zhang, 2013;Parmentier, 2014;Parmentier, Elsley and Ljungberg, 2010;Wetzel, Widmann and Schröger, 2012). These results suggest that in distraction paradigms, participants actually use the "task-irrelevant" events as temporal cues to enhance their task performance, that is, these events are not disregarded at all, but are incorporated in the task-behavior of the participants.…”

The semantic aftermath of distraction by deviant sounds: Crosstalk interference is mediated by the predictability of semantic congruency

“…One class of stimuli known to yield this type of distraction is unexpected changes in our auditory surroundings (deviant stimuli). Deviant stimuli are defined as stimuli that violate predictions by deviating from an otherwise repetitive or structured sequence on the basis of relatively low-level characteristics (such as sensory features; e. g., Berti, 2013;Schröger, 1996Schröger, , 1997Schröger andWolff, 1998a,1998b), more abstract ones such as rules (e.g., Bendixen et al, 2007Costa-Faidella et al, 2011;Horváth et al, 2001;Nordby et al, 1988;Paavilainen et al, 2001;Schröger et al, 2007;van Zuijen et al, 2006), or self-generated predictions (Knolle et al, 2013;SanMiguel et al, 2013;Timm et al, 2014).…”

“…At the behavioral level, deviant sounds delay (and sometimes reduce the accuracy of) responses to target stimuli (see Parmentier, 2014, for a conspectus of behavioral deviance distraction studies), whether presented in uni-modal auditory (e.g., Berti andSchröger, 2003, 2004;Schröger, 1996) or visual tasks (Berti and Schröger, 2004;Boll and Berti, 2009;Grimm et al, 2009), or in cross-modal oddball tasks where an irrelevant stimulus in one sensory modality precedes a target stimulus in another (auditory-visual: Andrés et al, 2006;Boll and Berti, 2009;Escera et al, 1998Escera et al, , 2001Leiva et al, 2014aLeiva et al, , 2014bLi et al, 2013;Mayas et al, 2014;Parmentier and Andrés, 2010;SanMiguel et al, 2010;van Mourik et al, 2007;Wetzel et al, 2009;tactile-visual: Parmentier et al, 2011).…”