A comparison of auditory and visual distraction effects: behavioral and event-related indices

• Published in: Brain research. Cognitive brain research Vol. 10; no. 3; pp. 265 - 273
• Main Authors: Berti, Stefan, Schröger, Erich
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 2001; Elsevier Science
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation; Adult; Attention - physiology; Audition; Behavior - physiology; Behavioral psychophysiology; Biological and medical sciences; Brain Mapping; Distraction; Electroencephalography; Electrooculography; Electrophysiology; Event-related potential; Evoked Potentials - physiology; Female; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Male; Memory, Short-Term; Photic Stimulation; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reaction Time; Sensory memory; Vision; Working memory; Event-related potential; Audition; Vision; Sensory memory; Distraction; Working memory; Neural basis of behavior; Human; Hearing; Central nervous system; Attention; Electrophysiology; Perception; Cognition; Event evoked potential; Brain (vertebrata)
• DOI: 10.1016/S0926-6410(00)00044-6
• ISSN: 0926-6410

Infrequent task-irrelevant deviations in the frequency of a tone may distract our attention away from the processing of task-relevant tone duration. The distraction obtained in the auditory paradigm is reflected in prolonged reaction times in duration discrimination and in P3a. The P3a is followed by a late negative component, which may be related to a re-orienting process following distraction (RON, re-orienting negativity). The present study aimed at comparing effects of the auditory and a corresponding visual distraction paradigm. Distraction elicited a deviance-related negativity which revealed a modality-specific distribution. It was followed by P3a (350-ms post-stimulus) and by RON (500-ms post-stimulus). RON did not occur with long-duration visual stimuli indicating a difference in visual and auditory distraction. Moreover, the results suggest that in both tasks irrelevant deviants were detected by modality-specific processes which caused an attention shift.