What we expect is not always what we get: evidence for both the direction-of-change and the specific-stimulus hypotheses of auditory attentional capture.
Participants were requested to respond to a sequence of visual targets while listening to a well-known lullaby. One of the notes in the lullaby was occasionally exchanged with a pattern deviant. Experiment 1 found that deviants capture attention as a function of the pitch difference between the deviant and the replaced/expected tone. However, when the pitch difference between the expected tone and the deviant tone is held constant, a violation to the direction-of-pitch change across tones can also capture attention (Experiment 2). Moreover, in more complex auditory environments, wherein it is difficult to build a coherent neural model of the sound environment from which expectations are formed, deviations can capture attention but it appears to matter less whether this is a violation from a specific stimulus or a violation of the current direction-of-change (Experiment 3). The results support the expectation violation account of auditory distraction and suggest that there are at least two different expectations that can be violated: One appears to be bound to a specific stimulus and the other would seem to be bound to a more global cross-stimulus rule such as the direction-of-change based on a sequence of preceding sound events. Factors like base-rate probability of tones within the sound environment might become the driving mechanism of attentional capture--rather than violated expectations--in complex sound environments.
Department of Building, Energy and Environmental Engineering, University of Gävle, Gävle, Sweden.
Anatole
A
Nöstl
Department of Building, Energy and Environmental Engineering, University of Gävle, Gävle, Sweden; School of Psychology, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, United Kingdom.
John E
JE
Marsh
Department of Building, Energy and Environmental Engineering, University of Gävle, Gävle, Sweden; Linnaeus Centre HEAD, Swedish Institute for Disability Research, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden.
Patrik
P
Sörqvist
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans