Is the Oddball Just an Odd-One-Out? The Predictive Value of Rule-Violating Events

Abstract

ABSTRACT Auditory distraction refers to attentional resources being captured away from a current task or mind-set by unrelated auditory information. It is often studied in oddball paradigms, where regular (standard) sounds are occasionally exchanged for deviant sounds, which then elicit signs of distraction based on their unexpectedness. Here, we examine the widely neglected characteristics of deviants being bearers of predictive information themselves: We applied a modified version of the oddball paradigm in an active deviant detection task (rather than a distraction paradigm) using facilitation effects of predictive information as our key measure. Naive participants listened to an oddball sequence including two types of deviants that followed diametrically opposed rules: one deviant sound occurred mostly in pairs (double rule) and the other deviant sound occurred mostly in isolation (single rule). By this manipulation, we set up different expectations regarding the next sound after the first encounter of a deviant. On average, median response time decreased from the first to the second deviant by approximately 84 ms when deviant repetition probability was high (i.e., double rule confirmations). There was no evidence of such a facilitation effect for low conditional probability repetition deviants (i.e., single rule violations). Furthermore, significantly more false alarms were produced in response to standards following high (double rule violation) compared to low (single rule confirmation) conditional repetition deviants. These findings provide evidence that deviants are integrated into the predictive models, enabling precise predictions about auditory events in the imminent future. This should be kept in mind for theories on auditory distraction and suggests an additional process issued by the deviant, in addition to its call for attention interfering with concurrent processing. It determines the processing of the subsequent sound based on whether it matches or mismatches the deviant’s prediction.