showing 12 related works from this author
Diagnostic subgroups of developmental dyslexia have different deficits in neural processing of tones and phonemes.
2004
The present study addressed auditory processing in 8-11-year-old children with developmental dyslexia by means of event-related brain potentials (ERP). Cortical sound reception was evaluated by recording N250 responses to syllables and tones and cortical sound discrimination by analyzing the mismatch negativity (MMN) to syllable and tone changes. We found that both cortical sound reception and sound discrimination were impaired in dyslexic children. The analysis of the data obtained from two dyslexic subgroups, Dyslexics-1 being impaired in non-word reading (or both non-word and frequent word reading) and Dyslexics-2 in frequent word reading but not in non-word reading, revealed that the MM…
Disentangling effects of auditory distraction and of stimulus-response sequence
2009
When we pay attention to one task, irrelevant changes may interfere. The effect of changes on behavioral and electrophysiological responses has been studied in two separate research fields: Research on Distraction states that a rare irrelevant change takes attention away from the primary task. Research on Sequences states that any change in stimulus or response incurs a cost or benefit depending on the kind of change. To disentangle distraction from sequence effects, we made task-irrelevant changes rare in one condition and frequent in another while also assessing stimulus and response changes from trial to trial. Participants used key presses to classify syllables presented in two differen…
Bottom-up influences on working memory: behavioral and electrophysiological distraction varies with distractor strength.
2004
Abstract. The present study investigates bottom-up effects serving the optimal balance between focusing attention on relevant information and distractibility by potentially significant events outside the focus of attention. We tested whether distraction, indicated by behavioral and event-related brain potential (ERP) measures, varies with the strength of task-irrelevant deviances. Twenty subjects performed a tone-duration discrimination task (200 or 400 ms sinusoidal tones presented equiprobably). The stimuli were presented with frequent standard (p = 0.84; 1000 Hz) or infrequent deviant (p = 0.16) pitch. These task-irrelevant pitch changes consisted in a frequency increase/decrease of 1%,…
Visual distraction: a behavioral and event-related brain potential study in humans.
2006
Recent studies reported that the detection of changes in the visual stimulation results in distraction of cognitive processing. From event-related brain potentials it was argued that distraction is triggered by the automatic detection of deviants. We tested whether distraction effects are confined to the detection of a deviation or can be triggered by changes per se, namely by rare stimuli that were not deviant with respect to the stimulation. The results obtained comparable early event-related brain potential effects for rare and deviant stimuli, suggesting an automatic detection of these changes. In contrast, behavioral distraction and attention-related event-related brain potential compo…
Die Bedeutung sensorischer Verarbeitung und Aufmerksamkeitssteuerung für Arbeitsgedächtnisfunktionen
2003
Zusammenfassung. Arbeitsgedächtnismodelle betonen meist die Bedeutung des Arbeitsgedächtnisses als Informationsspeicher für höhere kognitive Aufgaben. Wir betrachten in unseren aktuellen Arbeiten zum Arbeitsgedächtnis einen anderen Aspekt: Aufbauend auf theoretischen Positionen, die eine enge Verbindung zwischen dem Arbeitsgedächtnis und dem Aufmerksamkeitssystem postulieren (z.B. Cowan, 1999 ), untersuchen wir die unwillkürliche Aufmerksamkeitsablenkung im Zusammenspiel mit zentralen Steuerprozessen als Grundlage für flexibles Verhalten. Dabei zeigt sich, dass neben den bekannten Speicher- und Kontrollprozessen, die Einstellung der Distrahierbarkeit und die willkürliche Reorientierung auf…
The development of involuntary and voluntary attention from childhood to adulthood: A combined behavioral and event-related potential study
2006
Abstract Objective This study investigated auditory involuntary and voluntary attention in children aged 6–8, 10–12 and young adults. The strength of distracting stimuli (20% and 5% pitch changes) and the amount of allocation of attention were varied. Methods In an auditory distraction paradigm event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioral data were measured from subjects either performing a sound duration discrimination task or watching a silent video. Results Pitch changed sounds caused prolonged reaction times and decreased hit rates in all age groups. Larger distractors (20%) caused stronger distraction in children, but not in adults. The amplitudes of mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a, a…
Age dependent changes of distractibility and reorienting of attention revisited: an event-related potential study.
2012
Adults of three age groups (18-27, 39-45, and 59-66 years) performed an auditory duration discrimination task with short (200 ms) or long (400 ms) sinusoidal tones. Performance was highly accurate and reaction times were on the same level in all groups, indicating no differences in auditory duration processing. Task irrelevant rare changes of the frequency of the stimuli were introduced to check whether the subjects, firstly, were distracted by changes in the environment while focusing on the task relevant information (indicated by prolonged responses), and, secondly, could re-focus on the relevant task after distraction. The results show that a distraction effect is present in all groups. …
Different interference effects in musicians and a control group.
2006
In the present study musicians and normal control subjects performed an S1-S2 pitch comparison task, which included the presentation of intervening tones during the retention interval. The time for encoding and storing the pitch of S1 was varied between 200 and 1,500 ms by changing the pause between the S1 offset and the onset of the intervening tones. Although musicians outperformed the control group with longer pauses after the S1 offset, this advantage was relatively small with shorter pauses. These results suggest that the advantage of musicians in storing auditory information is not solely due to their superior encoding of information but also to improved working memory operations.
Response repetition vs. response change modulates behavioral and electrophysiological effects of distraction
2004
If stimulation occasionally contains distracting information, behavioral responses to task-relevant aspects of the stimulation are prolonged and more error prone. Additionally, event-related potentials (ERPs) acquired in an auditory distraction paradigm show that the distracting information elicits the components mismatch negativity (MMN), P3a and reorienting negativity (RON). Here, we assess to what extent sequential dependencies in the stimulation influence such indicators of distraction. Data of four experiments were reanalyzed for response repetition and response change trials separately. Behavioral performance on Deviants suggests markedly smaller distraction effects in change compared…
Distraction effects in vision: behavioral and event-related potential indices.
2004
Evidence is presented which shows that slight changes in serially presented visual input can be detected automatically and may result in behavioral distraction. In two experiments, reaction times on a two-alternative, forced-choice duration discrimination task were prolonged in trials where a task-irrelevant change in the location of the stimulus occurred. The P1 and N1 components of the event-related potential were enhanced in such trials. However, electrophysiological and behavioral effects were not affected when the duration discrimination was made more difficult and the N1 amplitude increase and RT prolongation were confined to situations where task-irrelevant location changes were infr…
Primary motor area contribution to attentional reorienting after distraction
2008
The anatomical structures involved in distraction-related processing in the auditory domain were investigated using magnetoencephalography. Participants performed a duration-discrimination task on a sequence of 200 and 400 ms long tones. Infrequent (12%) task-irrelevant pitch changes resulted in slower discriminative responses and more errors. Event-related potentials to these changes show an increased N1, a mismatch negativity, a P3a, and a reorienting negativity. The event-related magnetic fields revealed focal activities in superior and medial temporal areas in the N1/mismatch negativity time range. No significant activity was found in the P3a interval. In the reorienting negativity inte…
Distraction and reorientation in children: A behavioral and ERP study
2004
In the context of distraction, involuntary orienting to task-irrelevant deviations and the following reorienting to task-relevant stimulus information were studied in children aged 5-6 years. In an auditory distraction paradigm, reaction times were prolonged by 51 ms in trials including a task-irrelevant stimulus deviancy. Event-related potentials (ERPs) revealed a mismatch response (MMR) at 252 ms and a reorienting negativity (RON) 476 ms post-stimulus in response to deviating sounds. These behavioral and ERP effects resemble those reported for adults. We conclude that kindergarten children are prone to distraction, although they can quite effectively but not fully shield working memory op…