title: Concentration: The Neural Underpinnings of How Cognitive Load Shields Against Distraction.
abstract: Whether cognitive load-and other aspects of task difficulty-increases or decreases distractibility is subject of much debate in contemporary psychology. One camp argues that cognitive load usurps executive resources, which otherwise could be used for attentional control, and therefore cognitive load increases distraction. The other camp argues that cognitive load demands high levels of concentration (focal-task engagement), which suppresses peripheral processing and therefore decreases distraction. In this article, we employed an functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) protocol to explore whether higher cognitive load in a visually-presented task suppresses task-irrelevant auditory processing in cortical and subcortical areas. The results show that selectively attending to an auditory stimulus facilitates its neural processing in the auditory cortex, and switching the locus-of-attention to the visual modality decreases the neural response in the auditory cortex. When the cognitive load of the task presented in the visual modality increases, the neural response to the auditory stimulus is further suppressed, along with increased activity in networks related to effortful attention. Taken together, the results suggest that higher cognitive load decreases peripheral processing of task-irrelevant information-which decreases distractibility-as a side effect of the increased activity in a focused-attention network.
authors.affiliation: Department of Building, Energy and Environmental Engineering, University of GävleGävle, Sweden; Linnaeus Centre HEAD, Swedish Institute for Disability Research, Linköping UniversityLinköping, Sweden.
authors.forename: Patrik
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Sörqvist
authors.affiliation: Linnaeus Centre HEAD, Swedish Institute for Disability Research, Linköping UniversityLinköping, Sweden; Department of Behavioral Sciences and Learning, Linköping UniversityLinköping, Sweden; Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization (CMIV), Linköping UniversityLinköping, Sweden.
authors.forename: Örjan
authors.initials: Ö
authors.lastname: Dahlström
authors.affiliation: Linnaeus Centre HEAD, Swedish Institute for Disability Research, Linköping UniversityLinköping, Sweden; Department of Behavioral Sciences and Learning, Linköping UniversityLinköping, Sweden; Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization (CMIV), Linköping UniversityLinköping, Sweden.
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Karlsson
authors.affiliation: Linnaeus Centre HEAD, Swedish Institute for Disability Research, Linköping UniversityLinköping, Sweden; Department of Behavioral Sciences and Learning, Linköping UniversityLinköping, Sweden.
authors.forename: Jerker
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rönnberg
keywords: cognitive load; concentration; distraction; selective attention; working memory