Search results for "Auditory distraction"
showing 5 items of 5 documents
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…
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…
Auditory Distraction by Meaningless Irrelevant Speech: A Developmental Study
2014
Summary The irrelevant sound effect (ISE) typically refers to a disruptive effect of a to-be-ignored sound in serial recall tasks, where lists of visually presented items (digits and letters) must be recalled in serial order. Although extensively studied in adults, studies on developmental aspects of the ISE are scarce. The present study aims to increase our understanding of developmental changes of auditory distraction in children beyond serial recall. Two tasks (i.e., word categorization and evaluation of simple mathematical equations) were designed to test retrieval from semantic memory. Proportion correct and reaction times (adjusted for speed–accuracy tradeoff) were measured in 8–9 and…
Age differences in the irrelevant sound effect: A serial recognition paradigm
2015
In adults, the disrupting effect of irrelevant background sounds with distinct temporalspectral variations (changing-state sounds) on short-term memory performance was found to be robust. In the present study, a verbal serial recognition task was used to investigate this so-called Irrelevant Sound Effect (ISE) in adults and 8- to 10-year-old children. An essential part of the short-term memory impairment during changing-state speech is due to interference processes (changing-state effect) which can be differentiated from the deviation effect of auditory distraction. In line with recent findings (Hughes et al., 2013), our study demonstrates that the changing-state effect is not modulated by …
Quantifying Intermodal Distraction by Emotion During Math Performance: An Electrophysiological Approach
2019
Emotionally engaging stimuli are powerful competitors for limited attention capacity. In the cognitive neuroscience laboratory, the presence of task-irrelevant emotionally arousing visual distractors prompts decreased performance and attenuated brain responses measured in concurrent visual tasks. The extent to which distraction effects occur across different sensory modalities is not yet established, however. Here, we examined the extent and time course of competition between a naturalistic distractor sound and a visual task stimulus, using dense-array electroencephalography (EEG) recordings from 20 college students. Steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEPs) were quantified from EEG, e…