showing 5 related works from this author
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…
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…
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…
Mapping symbols to sounds: electrophysiological correlates of the impaired reading process in dyslexia
2012
Dyslexic and control first-grade school children were compared in a Symbol-to-Sound matching test based on a non-linguistic audiovisual training which is known to have a remediating effect on dyslexia. Visual symbol patterns had to be matched with predicted sound patterns. Sounds incongruent with the corresponding visual symbol (thus not matching the prediction) elicited the N2b and P3a event-related potential (ERP) components relative to congruent sounds in control children. Their ERPs resembled the ERP effects previously reported for healthy adults with this paradigm. In dyslexic children, N2b onset latency was delayed and its amplitude significantly reduced over left hemisphere whereas P…
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…