Cognitive control of auditory distraction : Impact of task difficulty, foreknowledge, and working memory capacity supports duplex-mechanism account.

Hurlstone, Mark John (2013) Cognitive control of auditory distraction : Impact of task difficulty, foreknowledge, and working memory capacity supports duplex-mechanism account. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 39 (2). pp. 539-553. ISSN 0096-1523

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Abstract

The influence of top-down cognitive control on 2 putatively distinct forms of distraction was investigated. Attentional capture by a task-irrelevant auditory deviation (e.g., a female-spoken token following a sequence of male-spoken tokens)—as indexed by its disruption of a visually presented recall task—was abolished when focal-task engagement was promoted either by increasing the difficulty of encoding the visual to-be-remembered stimuli (by reducing their perceptual discriminability; Experiments 1 and 2) or by providing foreknowledge of an imminent deviation (Experiment 2). In contrast, distraction from continuously changing auditory stimuli (“changing-state effect”) was not modulated by task-difficulty or foreknowledge (Experiment 3). We also confirmed that individual differences in working memory capacity—typically associated with maintaining task-engagement in the face of distraction—predict the magnitude of the deviation effect, but not the changing-state effect. This convergence of experimental and psychometric data strongly supports a duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction: Auditory attentional capture (deviation effect) is open to top-down cognitive control, whereas auditory distraction caused by direct conflict between the sound and focal-task processing (changing-state effect) is relatively immune to such control. (APA PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

Item Type:
Journal Article
Journal or Publication Title:
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
Uncontrolled Keywords:
/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/2800/2802
Subjects:
?? behavioral neuroscienceexperimental and cognitive psychology ??
ID Code:
145549
Deposited By:
Deposited On:
13 Jul 2020 11:10
Refereed?:
Yes
Published?:
Published
Last Modified:
15 Jul 2024 20:49