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Parmentier FBR, Fraga I, Leiva A, Ferré P. Distraction by deviant sounds: disgusting and neutral words capture attention to the same extent. PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH 2019; 84:1801-1814. [PMID: 31053888 PMCID: PMC7478951 DOI: 10.1007/s00426-019-01192-4] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/08/2018] [Accepted: 04/20/2019] [Indexed: 01/21/2023]
Abstract
Several studies have argued that words evoking negative emotions, such as disgust, grab attention more than neutral words, and leave traces in memory that are more persistent. However, these conclusions are typically based on tasks requiring participants to process the semantic content of these words in a voluntarily manner. We sought to compare the involuntary attention grabbing power of disgusting and neutral words using them as rare and unexpected auditory distractors in a cross-modal oddball task, and then probing the participants’ memory for these stimuli in a surprise recognition task. Frequentist and Bayesian analyses converged to show that, compared to a standard tone, disgusting and neutral auditory words produced significant but equivalent levels of distraction in a visual categorization task, that they elicited comparable levels of memory discriminability in the incidental recognition task, and that the participants’ individual sensitivity to disgust did not influence the results. Our results suggest that distraction by unexpected words is not modulated by their emotional valence, at least when these words are task-irrelevant and are temporally and perceptually decoupled from the target stimuli.
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Affiliation(s)
- Fabrice B R Parmentier
- Department of Psychology and Research Institute for Health Sciences (iUNICS), Ed. Cientifico-Tecnico (iUNICS), University of the Balearic Islands, Ctra de Valldemossa, km 75, 07122, Palma, Balearic Islands, Spain. .,Balearic Islands Health Research Institute (IdISBa), Palma, Balearic Islands, Spain. .,School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia.
| | - Isabel Fraga
- Cognitive Processes and Behavior Research Group, Department of Social Psychology, Basic Psychology and Methodology, University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
| | - Alicia Leiva
- Department of Psychology and Research Institute for Health Sciences (iUNICS), Ed. Cientifico-Tecnico (iUNICS), University of the Balearic Islands, Ctra de Valldemossa, km 75, 07122, Palma, Balearic Islands, Spain.,Balearic Islands Health Research Institute (IdISBa), Palma, Balearic Islands, Spain
| | - Pilar Ferré
- Department of Psychology and CRAMC, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain
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Vasilev MR, Parmentier FB, Angele B, Kirkby JA. Distraction by deviant sounds during reading: An eye-movement study. Q J Exp Psychol (Hove) 2018; 72:1863-1875. [PMID: 30518304 PMCID: PMC6613176 DOI: 10.1177/1747021818820816] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 12/02/2022]
Abstract
Oddball studies have shown that sounds unexpectedly deviating from an otherwise repeated sequence capture attention away from the task at hand. While such distraction is typically regarded as potentially important in everyday life, previous work has so far not examined how deviant sounds affect performance on more complex daily tasks. In this study, we developed a new method to examine whether deviant sounds can disrupt reading performance by recording participants’ eye movements. Participants read single sentences in silence and while listening to task-irrelevant sounds. In the latter condition, a 50-ms sound was played contingent on the fixation of five target words in the sentence. On most occasions, the same tone was presented (standard sound), whereas on rare and unexpected occasions it was replaced by white noise (deviant sound). The deviant sound resulted in significantly longer fixation durations on the target words relative to the standard sound. A time-course analysis showed that the deviant sound began to affect fixation durations around 180 ms after fixation onset. Furthermore, deviance distraction was not modulated by the lexical frequency of target words. In summary, fixation durations on the target words were longer immediately after the presentation of the deviant sound, but there was no evidence that it interfered with the lexical processing of these words. The present results are in line with the recent proposition that deviant sounds yield a temporary motor suppression and suggest that deviant sounds likely inhibit the programming of the next saccade.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Fabrice Br Parmentier
- 2 University of the Balearic Islands, Department of Psychology and Research Institute for Health Sciences (iUNICS), Palma, Spain.,3 Balearic Islands Health Research Institute (IdISBa), Palma, Spain.,4 University of Western Australia, School of Psychology, Perth, WA, Australia
| | - Bernhard Angele
- 1 Bournemouth University, Department of Psychology, Poole, UK
| | - Julie A Kirkby
- 1 Bournemouth University, Department of Psychology, Poole, UK
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Parmentier FBR, Pacheco-Unguetti AP, Valero S. Food words distract the hungry: Evidence of involuntary semantic processing of task-irrelevant but biologically-relevant unexpected auditory words. PLoS One 2018; 13:e0190644. [PMID: 29300763 PMCID: PMC5754127 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0190644] [Citation(s) in RCA: 9] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/28/2017] [Accepted: 12/18/2017] [Indexed: 11/19/2022] Open
Abstract
Rare changes in a stream of otherwise repeated task-irrelevant sounds break through selective attention and disrupt performance in an unrelated visual task by triggering shifts of attention to and from the deviant sound (deviance distraction). Evidence indicates that the involuntary orientation of attention to unexpected sounds is followed by their semantic processing. However, past demonstrations relied on tasks in which the meaning of the deviant sounds overlapped with features of the primary task. Here we examine whether such processing is observed when no such overlap is present but sounds carry some relevance to the participants’ biological need to eat when hungry. We report the results of an experiment in which hungry and satiated participants partook in a cross-modal oddball task in which they categorized visual digits (odd/even) while ignoring task-irrelevant sounds. On most trials the irrelevant sound was a sinewave tone (standard sound). On the remaining trials, deviant sounds consisted of spoken words related to food (food deviants) or control words (control deviants). Questionnaire data confirmed state (but not trait) differences between the two groups with respect to food craving, as well as a greater desire to eat the food corresponding to the food-related words in the hungry relative to the satiated participants. The results of the oddball task revealed that food deviants produced greater distraction (longer response times) than control deviants in hungry participants while the reverse effect was observed in satiated participants. This effect was observed in the first block of trials but disappeared thereafter, reflecting semantic saturation. Our results suggest that (1) the semantic content of deviant sounds is involuntarily processed even when sharing no feature with the primary task; and that (2) distraction by deviant sounds can be modulated by the participants’ biological needs.
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Affiliation(s)
- Fabrice B. R. Parmentier
- Neuropsychology & Cognition Group, Department of Psychology and Research Institute for Health Sciences (iUNICS), University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Balearic Islands, Spain
- Balearic Islands Health Research Institute (IdISBa), Palma, Balearic Islands, Spain
- School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia, Australia
- * E-mail:
| | - Antonia P. Pacheco-Unguetti
- Neuropsychology & Cognition Group, Department of Psychology and Research Institute for Health Sciences (iUNICS), University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Balearic Islands, Spain
- Centro de Psicología Pacheco Unguetti, Granada, Spain
| | - Sara Valero
- Neuropsychology & Cognition Group, Department of Psychology and Research Institute for Health Sciences (iUNICS), University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Balearic Islands, Spain
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Pacheco-Unguetti AP, Gelabert JM, Parmentier FBR. Can auditory deviant stimuli temporarily suspend cognitive processing? Evidence from patients with anxiety. Q J Exp Psychol (Hove) 2016; 69:150-60. [DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2015.1031145] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/23/2022]
Abstract
While anxiety is typically thought to increase distractibility, this notion mostly derives from studies using emotionally loaded distractors presented in the same modality as the target stimuli and tasks involving crosstalk interference. We examined whether pathological anxiety might also increase distractibility for emotionally neutral irrelevant sounds presented prior to target stimuli in a task where these stimuli do not compete for selection. Patients with anxiety and control participants categorized visual digits preceded by task-irrelevant sounds that changed on rare trials (auditory deviance). Both groups exhibited an equivalent increase in response times following a deviant sound but patients showed a reduction of response accuracy, which was entirely due to an increase in response omissions. We conclude that the involuntary capture of attention by unexpected stimuli may, in patients with anxiety, result in a temporary suspension of cognitive activity.
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Affiliation(s)
- Antonia P. Pacheco-Unguetti
- Department of Psychology & Institute of Health Sciences (iUNICS), University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Spain
- Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria de Palma (IdISPa), Palma, Spain
| | - Joan Miquel Gelabert
- Department of Psychology & Institute of Health Sciences (iUNICS), University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Spain
- Quirón Palmaplanas Hospital, Palma, Spain
| | - Fabrice B. R. Parmentier
- Department of Psychology & Institute of Health Sciences (iUNICS), University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Spain
- Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria de Palma (IdISPa), Palma, Spain
- School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia
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Schröger E, Kotz SA, SanMiguel I. Bridging prediction and attention in current research on perception and action. Brain Res 2015; 1626:1-13. [PMID: 26348988 DOI: 10.1016/j.brainres.2015.08.037] [Citation(s) in RCA: 20] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.2] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 10/23/2022]
Abstract
Prediction and attention are fundamental brain functions in the service of perception and action. Theories on prediction relate to neural (mental) models inferring about (present or future) sensory or action-related information, whereas theories of attention are about the control of information flow underlying perception and action. Both concepts are related and not always clearly distinguishable. The special issue includes current research on prediction and attention in various subfields of perception and action. It especially considers interactions between predictive and attentive processes, which constitute a newly emerging and highly interesting field of research. As outlined in this editorial, the contributions in this special issue allow specifying as well as bridging concepts on prediction and attention. The joint consideration of prediction and attention also reveals common functional principles of perception and action.
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Affiliation(s)
- Erich Schröger
- Institute of Psychology, University of Leipzig, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany.
| | - Sonja A Kotz
- Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Department of Neuropsychology, P. O. Box 500 355, D-04303 Leipzig, Germany; Faculty of Psychology & Neuroscience, Department of Neuropsychology & Psychopharmacology, University of Maastricht, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
| | - Iria SanMiguel
- Institute for Brain Cognition and Behavior (IR3C) and Department of Psychiatry and Clinical Psychobiology, University of Barcelona, 08035 Barcelona, Spain.
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