Cognitive control of auditory distraction: impact of task difficulty, foreknowledge, and working memory capacity supports duplex-mechanism account.
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.
School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK. Rob.Hughes@rhul.ac.ukk
Robert W
RW
Hughes
Mark J
MJ
Hurlstone
John E
JE
Marsh
François
F
Vachon
Dylan M
DM
Jones
D001288:Attention; D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D007721:Knowledge of Results, Psychological; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D012691:Serial Learning; D013067:Speech Perception; D013334:Students / Q000523:psychology; D055815:Young Adult