Abstract

In everyday situations auditory selective attention requires listeners to suppress task-irrelevant stimuli and to resolve conflicting information in order to make appropriate goal-directed decisions. Traditionally, these two processes (i.e. distractor suppression and conflict resolution) have been studied separately. In the present study we measured neuroelectric activity while participants performed a new paradigm in which both processes are quantified. In separate block of trials, participants indicate whether two sequential tones share the same pitch or location depending on the block’s instruction. For the distraction measure, a positive component peaking at ~250 ms was found – a distraction positivity. Brain electrical source analysis of this component suggests different generators when listeners attended to frequency and location, with the distraction by location more posterior than the distraction by frequency, providing support for the dual-pathway theory. For the conflict resolution measure, a negative frontocentral component (270–450 ms) was found, which showed similarities with that of prior studies on auditory and visual conflict resolution tasks. The timing and distribution are consistent with two distinct neural processes with suppression of task-irrelevant information occurring before conflict resolution. This new paradigm may prove useful in clinical populations to assess impairments in filtering out task-irrelevant information and/or resolving conflicting information.

Highlights

  • It is well accepted that attention is not a unitary phenomenon, but rather involves processes that may vary as a function of the task at hand[1, 2]

  • The Pd appears to be similar to another event-related potentials (ERPs) modulation, the PTc, which is thought to index the suppression of distracter stimulus

  • A change in the task-irrelevant feature significantly distracted the listeners regardless of whether the task-relevant feature changed or not within the trial. These behavioral effects coincided with a positive displacement that was best illustrated in the difference wave between ERP elicited by trials when the task-irrelevant tone feature changed and those obtained during trials when the task-irrelevant tone feature did not change

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Summary

Introduction

It is well accepted that attention is not a unitary phenomenon, but rather involves processes that may vary as a function of the task at hand[1, 2]. We use electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate the neural correlates supporting suppression of distracting irrelevant information and conflict resolution using a new auditory paradigm, the Test of Attention in Listening (TAiL)[13]. Prior research using scalp-recording of visual event-related potentials (ERPs) have revealed a distracter positivity (Pd) modulation. The small differences in latency and amplitude distribution between these two ERP modulations could be attributed to the salience of the distracter stimulus[15, 18] Further to these components, the rejection positivity (RP) has been used to describe a component in auditory-based studies akin to the Pd and PTc – with a frontocentral distribution occurring at 200–250 ms post-stimulus[6, 7, 19]. The ERPs presented earlier with an onset of 200 to 250 ms lasting until 500 ms and peaking at about 300 ms

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