Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hughes, Robert W
• Hurlstone, Mark J
• Marsh, John E
• Vachon, François
• Jones, Dylan M
• Enns, James T

Titel

Cognitive Control of Auditory Distraction: Impact of Task Difficulty, Foreknowledge, and Working Memory Capacity Supports Duplex-Mechanism Account

Ist Teil von

• Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance, 2013-04, Vol.39 (2), p.539-553

Ort / Verlag

Washington, DC: American Psychological Association

Erscheinungsjahr

2013

Quelle

Applied Social Sciences Index & Abstracts (ASSIA)

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• 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.