Distraction and Facilitation-Two Faces of the Same Coin?

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance 2012-06, Vol.38 (3), p.664-674
• Main Authors: Wetzel, Nicole, Widmann, Andreas, Schröger, Erich
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation; Activity levels. Psychomotricity; Adult; Adults; Attention; Auditory Perception; Auditory Stimulation; Auditory Stimuli; Bias; Biological and medical sciences; Cost benefit analysis; Deviant behaviour; Discrimination (Psychology); Distraction; Distractors; Experimental psychology; Female; Foreign Countries; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Germany; Human; Humans; Male; Noise; Novelty (Stimulus Dimension); Orienting Responses; Perception; Photic Stimulation; Probability; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Reaction Time; Reaction times; Recognition (Psychology); Sound; Stimulus Novelty; Task performance; Time; Vigilance. Attention. Sleep; Vision; Visual Discrimination; Visual Perception; Visual Stimulation; Visual task performance; Young Adult
• ISSN: 0096-1523; 1939-1277
• DOI: 10.1037/a0025856

Unexpected and task-irrelevant sounds can capture our attention and may cause distraction effects reflected by impaired performance in a primary task unrelated to the perturbing sound. The present auditory-visual oddball study examines the effect of the informational content of a sound on the performance in a visual discrimination task. The informational content was modulated by varying the sound-target interval and the probability of target occurrence. Effects of informational content were examined with two types of distractors: a burst of white noise (deviant) and environmental sounds (novel). Behavioral results reveal the following. (1) Novel and deviant sounds do not necessarily cause behavioral distraction effects when they are uninformative with respect to both time and probability of occurrence of a visual target. (2) Novel, but not deviant, sounds cause an unspecific bias toward facilitation. (3) The informational content of task-irrelevant sounds speeds reaction times, indicating the use of information not directly related to the task for enhancing performance. (4) It is suggested that performance in deviant and novel trials is the sum of the costs of attentional orienting and benefits of information as well as benefits of unspecific activation for novels.