Unexpected events disrupt visuomotor working memory and increase guessing

Abstract

When a unexpected event, such as a car honking, occurs in daily life, it often disrupts our train of thought. In the lab, this effect was recently modeled with a task in which verbal working memory (WM) was disrupted by unexpected auditory events (Wessel et al., 2016). Here, we tested whether this effect extends to a different type of WM, viz. visuomotor. We found that unexpected auditory events similarly decremented visuomotor WM. Moreover, this effect persisted for many more trials than previously shown, and the effect occurred for two types of unexpected auditory event. Furthermore, we found that unexpected events decremented WM by decreasing the quantity, but not necessarily the quality, of the items stored. These studies show a statistically robust, and across time enduring, impact of unexpected events on visuomotor WM. They also show an increase of guessing, consistent with a neuroscience-inspired theory that unexpected events ‘wipe out’ WM by stopping the ongoing maintenance of the trace.

Distraction by violation of sensory predictions: Functional distinction between deviant sounds and unexpected silences

“…Behavioral and electrophysiological studies have shown that deviance distraction originates from the violation of sensory predictions rather than from the deviant sound's low probability per se [42][43][44][45][46], is associated with a transient inhibition of actions [47][48][49][50], and is unaffected by response predictability [51]. Violations of predictions can potentially also take another form, however: the omission of the predicted auditory stimulus.…”