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Numerous studies using oddball tasks have shown that unexpected sounds presented in a predictable or repeated sequence (deviant vs. standard sounds) capture attention and negatively impact ongoing behavioral performance. Here, we examine an aspect of this effect that has gone relatively unnoticed: the impact of deviant sounds is stronger for response repetitions than for response switches. Our approach was two-fold. First, we carried out a simulation to estimate the likelihood that stimuli sequences used in past work may not have used balanced proportions of response repetition and switch trials. More specifically, we sought to determine whether the larger distraction effect for response repetitions may have reflected a rarer, and thereby more surprising, occurrence of such trials. To do so, we simulated 10,000 stimuli sets for a 2-AFC task with a proportion of deviant trial of 0.1 or 0.16. Second, we carried out a 2-AFC oddball task in which participants judged the duration of a tone (short vs. long). We carefully controlled the sequence of stimuli to ensure to balance the proportions of response repetitions and response switches across the standard and deviant conditions. The results of the stimuli simulation showed that, contrary to our concerns, response switches were more likely than response repetitions when left uncontrolled for. This suggests that the larger distraction found for response repetition in past work may in fact have been underestimated. In the tone duration judgment task, the results showed a large impact of the response type on distraction as measured by response times: Deviants sounds significantly delayed response repetitions but notably accelerated switches. These findings suggest that deviant sound hinder response repetition and encourage or bias the cognitive system towards a change of responses. We discuss these findings in relation to the adaptive nature of the involuntary detection of unexpected stimuli and in relation to the notion of partial repetition costs. We argue that results are in line with the binding account as well as with the signaling theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sounds deviating from an otherwise repeated or structured sequence capture attention and affect performance in an ongoing visual task negatively, testament to the balance between selective attention and change detection. Although deviance distraction has been the object of much research, its modulation across the life span has been more scarcely addressed. Recent findings suggest possible connections with working memory and response inhibition. In this study we measured the performance of children and young and older adults in a cross-modal oddball task (deviance distraction), a working memory task (working memory capacity), and a response inhibition task (ability to voluntarily inhibit an already planned action) with the aim to establish the contribution of the latter 2 to the first. Older adults exhibited significantly more deviance distraction than children and young adults (who did not differ from each other). Working memory capacity mediated deviance distraction in children and older adults (though in opposite directions) but not in young adults. Response inhibition capacities did not mediate deviance distraction in any of the age groups. Altogether the results suggest that although the increase in deviance distraction observed in old age may partly reflect the relative impairment of working memory mechanisms, there is no straightforward and stable relation between working memory capacity and deviance distraction across the life span. Furthermore, our results indicate that deviance distraction is unlikely to reflect the temporary inhibition of responses.

It is well established that a task-irrelevant sound (deviant sound) departing from an otherwise repetitive sequence of sounds (standard sounds) elicits an involuntary capture of attention and orienting response toward the deviant stimulus, resulting in the lengthening of response times in an ongoing task. Some have argued that this type of distraction can be reduced by cognitive control when visual stimuli cue the presentation of the deviant and standard sounds. We compared this account with an alternative explanation, namely, that cues may reduce distraction because cue processing depletes attentional resources from the orienting response to the deviant sound. We report the results of an experiment in which participants judged the movement direction of sounds in the absence of cues and in conditions in which the type of sound was cued early or immediately before the sounds. We found that cues predicting the presentation of deviant sounds eliminated behavioral distraction irrespective of the time available to process them. This finding lends support to the contention that distraction by deviant sounds can be reduced through cognitive control and rule out the division of attention as an alternative explanation of our results and those from past studies.

Past research has demonstrated that the occurrence of unexpected task-irrelevant changes in the auditory or visual sensory channels captured attention in an obligatory fashion, hindering behavioral performance in ongoing auditory or visual categorization tasks and generating orientation and re-orientation electrophysiological responses. We report the first experiment extending the behavioral study of cross-modal distraction to tactile novelty. Using a vibrotactile-visual cross-modal oddball task and a bespoke hand-arm vibration device, we found that participants were significantly slower at categorizing the parity of visually presented digits following a rare and unexpected change in vibrotactile stimulation (novelty distraction), and that this effect extended to the subsequent trial (postnovelty distraction). These results are in line with past research on auditory and visual novelty and fit the proposition of common and amodal cognitive mechanisms for the involuntary detection of change. (Contains 1 footnote and 2 figures.)

Past studies show that novel auditory stimuli, presented in the context of an otherwise repeated sound, capture participants' attention away from a focal task, resulting in measurable behavioral distraction. Novel sounds are traditionally defined as rare and unexpected but past studies have not sought to disentangle these concepts directly. Using a cross-modal oddball task, we contrasted these aspects orthogonally by manipulating the base rate and conditional probabilities of sound events. We report for the first time that behavioral distraction does not result from a sound's novelty "per se" but from the violation of the cognitive system's expectation based on the learning of conditional probabilities and, to some extent, the occurrence of a perceptual change from one sound to another.

Unexpected events often distract us. In the laboratory, novel auditory stimuli have been shown to capture attention away from a focal visual task and yield specific electrophysiological responses as well as a behavioral cost to performance. Distraction is thought to follow ineluctably from the sound's low probability of occurrence or, put more simply, its unexpected occurrence. Our study challenges this view with respect to behavioral distraction and argues that past research failed to identify the informational value of sound as a mediator of novelty distraction. We report an experiment showing that (1) behavioral novelty distraction is only observed when the sound announces the occurrence and timing of an upcoming visual target (as is the case in all past research); (2) that no such distraction is observed for deviant sounds conveying no such information; and that (3) deviant sounds can actually facilitate performance when these, but not the standards, convey information. We conclude that behavioral novelty distraction, as observed in oddball tasks, is observed in the presence of novel sounds but only when the cognitive system can take advantage of the auditory distracters to optimize performance. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)

The present study investigated the binding of verbal identity and spatial location in the retention of sequences of spatially distributed acoustic stimuli. Study stimuli varying in verbal content and spatial location (e.g. V[subscript 1]S[subscript 1], V[subscript 2]S[subscript 2], V[subscript 3]S[subscript 3], V[subscript 4]S[subscript 4]) were followed by a recognition probe stimulus. A critical test of the binding or integration of the verbal and spatial features of the study stimuli comprised a comparison of intact probes that preserved the association of those features (e.g. V[subscript 2]S[subscript 2] or V[subscript 3]S[subscript 3]) with recombined probes (e.g. V[subscript 2]S[subscript 3] or V[subscript 2]S[subscript 3]) that used verbal and spatial features from study items, but in new combinations. A series of five experiments showed evidence of the binding of sound identity and location information for both verbal stimuli (spoken letters) and artificial non-verbal stimuli. While binding tended to be stronger for the more recent items of the sequence, there was consistent evidence of the retention of associations of features for the early sequence items, suggesting durability of binding of auditory features over time (at least 5.5 s) and despite the interpolated processing of other stimuli. Both spatial and verbal recognition judgments were affected by the association of verbal and spatial features when the test procedure required attention to the two classes of information. However, when participants were able to focus attention on one class of information and ignore the other, spatial recognition judgments showed an advantage for intact probes compared to recombined probes, whereas verbal recognition judgments did not. The results are discussed with reference to the primacy of identity and location in the representation of sounds in working memory. (Contains 6 figures and 5 tables.)

Unexpected auditory stimuli are potent distractors, able to break through selective attention and disrupt performance in an unrelated visual task. This study examined the processing fate of novel sounds by examining the extent to which their semantic content is analyzed and whether the outcome of this processing can impact on subsequent behavior. This issue was investigated across five laboratory experiments in which participants categorized visual left and right arrows while instructed to ignore irrelevant sounds. The results showed that auditory novels that were incongruent with the visual target (e.g., word "left" presented before a right arrow) disrupted performance over and above congruent novels (semantic effect) while both types of novels delayed responses in the visual task compared to a standard sound (novelty effect). No semantic effect was observed for congruent and incongruent standards, suggesting that novelty detection is necessary for involuntary semantic processing to unravel. While the novelty effect augmented as the difference between novels and the standard increased, the semantic effect was immune to this variation. Furthermore, the novelty effect decreased across the task while the semantic effect did not. A general cognitive framework is proposed encompassing these new findings and previous work in an attempt to account for the behavioral impact of irrelevant auditory novels on primary task performance. (Contains 1 table and 5 figures.)

The grouping of list items is known to improve serial memory accuracy and constrain the nature of temporal errors. A recent study (M. T. Maybery, F. B. R. Parmentier, & D. M. Jones, 2002) showed that grouping results in a temporal organization of the participants' responses that mimics the list structure but not the timing of its presentation. Here the authors tested the prediction that the temporal grouping of responses should yield the same pattern of response time (RT) irrespective of the method of grouping at presentation. Comparing temporal, location, and voice grouping, the results show that although these methods impact on recall accuracy to varying degrees, all 3 conditions produce significant and equivalent peaks in RT at the first position of each group. The RT data were accurately simulated through a model based on ACT-R's (J. R. Anderson & M. Matessa, 1997) basic principles. Altogether, the data suggest that the temporal organization of responses in verbal serial recall results from (a) declarative knowledge about the list's structure that is independent of the perceptual means by which grouping is induced at presentation and (b) the level of activation of the items per se.

The present study includes seven experiments examining the effect of repetition learning (Hebb effect) on auditory spatial serial recall. Participants were asked to remember sequences of spatial locations marked by auditory stimuli, where one sequence was repeated across trials. Consistent with the proposition that the spatial scattering of auditory to-be-remembered stimuli hinders the pre-attentive processing of order information by preventing the perceptual organization of the stimuli into a coherent stream, Experiments 1 and 2 showed little repetition learning for such stimuli. The finding of a repetition learning effect for non-words presented from a single location (Experiment 3) indicated that the absence of repetition learning was not the result of the use of unfamiliar stimuli. However, Experiments 4 and 5 showed, respectively, that repetition learning is observed for non-words scattered across space, and for spatial locations when the stimuli are non-words. Experiment 6 ruled out an account of these data based on feature binding. Experiment 7 ruled out a distinctiveness account and highlighted the role of perceptual organization in repetition learning. Altogether, the data suggest that the presentation of stimuli spoken in a human voice offers a common carrier on the basis of which the locations are perceived as part of a coherent stream, thereby affording the pre-attentive processing of order information and repetition learning.

Unexpected stimuli are often able to distract us away from a task at hand. The present study seeks to explore some of the mechanisms underpinning this phenomenon. Studies of involuntary attention capture using the oddball task have repeatedly shown that infrequent auditory changes in a series of otherwise repeating sounds trigger an automatic response to the novel or deviant stimulus. This attention capture has been shown to disrupt participants' behavioral performance in a primary task, even when distractors and targets are asynchronous and presented in distinct sensory modalities. This distraction effect is generally considered as a by-product of the capture of attention by the novel or deviant stimulus, but the exact cognitive locus of this effect and the interplay between attention capture and target processing has remained relatively ignored. The present study reports three behavioral experiments using a cross-modal oddball task to examine whether the distraction triggered by auditory novelty affects the processing of the target stimuli. Our results showed that variations in the demands placed on the visual analysis (Experiment 1) or categorical processing of the target (Experiment 2) did not impact on distraction. Instead, the cancellation of distraction by the presentation of an irrelevant visual stimulus presented immediately before the visual target (Experiment 3) suggested that distraction originated in the shifts of attention occurring between attention capture and the onset of the target processing. Possible accounts of these shifts are discussed.

In 2 experiments, the authors tested whether the classical modality effect--that is, the stronger recency effect for auditory items relative to visual items--can be extended to the spatial domain. An order reconstruction task was undertaken with four types of material: visual-spatial, auditory-spatial, visual-verbal, and auditory-verbal. Similar serial position curves were obtained regardless of the nature of the to-be-remembered sequences, with the exception that a modality effect was found with spatial as well as with verbal materials. The results are discussed with regard to a number of models of short-term memory.

This study examined the role of stimulus characteristics in a visuospatial order reconstruction task in which participants were required to recall the order of sequences of spatial locations. The complexity of the to-be-remembered sequences, as measured by path crossing, path length, and angles, was found to affect serial memory, in terms of both recall accuracy and response times. The results demonstrate that not all sequences are remembered equally and that spatial characteristics of the sequences constitute an important variable in the understanding of visuospatial serial memory. More important, the data suggest that spatial path represents transitional information and that, as is the case in verbal serial memory, transitional information is of critical importance in serial memory.

Binding processes play a critical role in memory. We investigated whether the binding of (visually presented) verbal and spatial (locations) information involves general attentional resources, as stipulated in the revised working memory model, by comparing measures of binding in the presence and absence of a concurrent memory load. Using an adaptation of a probe recognition task contrasting performance between intact and recombined conditions, we found that the concurrent retention of a sequence of three pure tones eliminated verbal-spatial binding. The present study constitutes the first to directly measure the impact of a concurrent memory load on verbal-spatial binding and suggests that such binding may indeed recruit attentional resources, consistent with some recent findings in the visual-spatial binding literature.