Abstract
Emotionally engaging stimuli are powerful competitors for limited attention capacity. In the cognitive neuroscience laboratory, the presence of task-irrelevant emotionally arousing visual distractors prompts decreased performance and attenuated brain responses measured in concurrent visual tasks. The extent to which distraction effects occur across different sensory modalities is not yet established, however. Here, we examined the extent and time course of competition between a naturalistic distractor sound and a visual task stimulus, using dense-array electroencephalography (EEG) recordings from 20 college students. Steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEPs) were quantified from EEG, elicited by periodically flickering vignettes displaying basic arithmetic problems – the participants’ primary task. Concurrently, low-arousing and high-arousing sounds were presented, as well as auditory pink noise, used as a control. Capitalizing on the temporal dynamics of the ssVEP signal allowed us to study intermodal interference of the sounds with the processing of the visual math problems. We observed that high-arousing sounds were associated with diminished visuocortical responses and poor performance, compared to low-arousing sounds and pink noise, suggesting that emotional distraction acts across modalities. We discuss the role of sensory cortices in emotional distraction along with implications for translational research in educational neuroscience.
Highlights
The rapid and effective analysis of sensory information relevant to survival is critical to adaptive behavior
The current study sought to investigate the extent to which the presence of sound distractors varying in emotional intensity affects the behavioral performance and visuocortical response in a primary task involving simple arithmetic operations
We found that the presence of high-arousing sounds, such as a crying baby and Rock and Roll music, during the arithmetic task prompted diminished accuracy and reduced visuocortical state visual evoked potentials (ssVEPs), compared to trials in which low-arousing or pink noise distractors were presented to the auditory modality
Summary
The rapid and effective analysis of sensory information relevant to survival is critical to adaptive behavior. An impressive number of studies have observed heightened activity in sensory cortices during motivated attention, using electrophysiology (Cuthbert et al, 2000; Keil et al, 2002; Liu et al, 2012) as well as functional imaging techniques (Bradley et al, 2003; Sabatinelli et al, 2011) Contemporary audiovisual media, such as the World Wide Web, Quantifying Intermodal Distraction computer games, and television, rely heavily on capturing attention by means of changing motivationally salient stimuli such as violent or erotic scenes (Heim et al, 2013a; Iordan and Dolcos, 2015). Two central competing hypotheses have been discussed in the literature
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