Distraction by deviant sounds: disgusting and neutral words capture attention to the same extent

Fabrice B R Parmentier,Isabel Fraga,Alicia Leiva,Pilar Ferré

doi:10.1007/s00426-019-01192-4

Abstract

Several studies have argued that words evoking negative emotions, such as disgust, grab attention more than neutral words, and leave traces in memory that are more persistent. However, these conclusions are typically based on tasks requiring participants to process the semantic content of these words in a voluntarily manner. We sought to compare the involuntary attention grabbing power of disgusting and neutral words using them as rare and unexpected auditory distractors in a cross-modal oddball task, and then probing the participants’ memory for these stimuli in a surprise recognition task. Frequentist and Bayesian analyses converged to show that, compared to a standard tone, disgusting and neutral auditory words produced significant but equivalent levels of distraction in a visual categorization task, that they elicited comparable levels of memory discriminability in the incidental recognition task, and that the participants’ individual sensitivity to disgust did not influence the results. Our results suggest that distraction by unexpected words is not modulated by their emotional valence, at least when these words are task-irrelevant and are temporally and perceptually decoupled from the target stimuli.

Highlights

Numerous findings in psychology show that ongoing performance can be negatively affected by the presence of distracting stimuli, and that the degree of distraction exerted by such stimuli varies with certain factors
While values below 1 indicate that the null hypothesis is more credible than the experimental hypothesis, it is often considered that values below 1/3 are considered as strong support for the null effect, while values above 3 are regarded as strongly supporting the presence of an effect (Jeffreys, 1961)
Initial analyses were carried out to examine the effect of sound trial and task type on response times (RTs) and the proportion of correct responses in the cross-oddball task, and on the sensitivity index (d′), the decision criterion (C) and RTs in the recognition task

Summary

Introduction

Numerous findings in psychology show that ongoing performance can be negatively affected by the presence of distracting stimuli, and that the degree of distraction exerted by such stimuli varies with certain factors. At the behavioral level, unexpected sounds lengthen response times to targets in ongoing tasks and, sometimes, reduce response accuracy (e.g., Parmentier, 2014; Schröger, 1996) This effect is in part due to the involuntary shift of attention to, and away from, the unexpected sound (e.g., Escera et al, 1998; Parmentier, Elford, Escera, Andrés, & Miguel, 2008; Schröger, 1996), and emanates from the unexpected sounds’ violation of predictions rather than from their low probability of occurrence per se (e.g., Parmentier, Elsley, Andrés, & Barceló, 2011; Schröger, Bendixen, Trujillo-Barreto, & Roeber, 2007). Deviance distraction reduces or vanishes when unexpected sounds are predictable, be it explicitly (e.g., Horváth & Bendixen, 2012; Parmentier & Hebrero, 2013; Sussman, Winkler, & Schröger, 2003) or implicitly (e.g., Parmentier, Elsley, et al, 2011; Schröger et al, 2007)

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