1. 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
- Author
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John E. Marsh, Anatole Nöstl, and Patrik Sörqvist
- Subjects
Auditory perception ,business.product_category ,Medicinska och farmaceutiska grundvetenskaper ,media_common.quotation_subject ,specific-stimulus hypotheses ,lcsh:Medicine ,Social Sciences ,Poison control ,pitch differences ,Stimulus (physiology) ,Auditory distraction ,Cognition ,Memory ,Perception ,Psychophysics ,medicine ,Humans ,Learning ,Psychology ,Auditory system ,Attention ,Active listening ,lcsh:Science ,Headphones ,media_common ,Behavior ,Psykologi ,Multidisciplinary ,lcsh:R ,auditory attentional capture ,Cognitive Psychology ,Biology and Life Sciences ,Basic Medicine ,medicine.anatomical_structure ,Acoustic Stimulation ,Auditory Perception ,Evoked Potentials, Auditory ,Cognitive Science ,lcsh:Q ,Sensory Perception ,business ,Research Article ,Neuroscience ,Psychoacoustics ,Cognitive psychology - Abstract
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. Funding Agencies|Swedish Research Council [2010-2042]
- Published
- 2014