Abstract
In this study a cross-modal oddball task was employed to study the effect that words spoken either non-urgently or urgently would have on a digit categorization task and if women would exhibit greater behavioral inhibitory control. The words were unrelated to the task itself, but related to the action required to complete the task. Forty participants (21 women) conducted a computerized categorization task while exposed to a sinewave tone as a standard stimulus (75% of the trials) or a to-be ignored word (press, stop) spoken either non-urgently or urgently as unexpected auditory deviant stimulus (6.25% trials for each category). Urgent words had sharp intonation and an average fundamental frequency (F0) ranging from 191.9 (stop) to 204.6 (press) Hz. Non-urgent words had low intonation with average F0 ranging from 103.9.9 (stop) to 120.3 (press) Hz. As expected, deviant distraction and longer response times were found by exposure to the word stop, but deviant distraction was not found to be significant with the word press or due to intonation. While the results showed that women had in general longer reaction times, there were no gender differences found related to the deviant distraction caused by word or intonation. The present results do not support the hypothesis that women have greater behavioral inhibitory control, but there was evidence that the meaning of the word could influence response times.
Highlights
The detection of unexpected auditory events is of paramount importance because it can signal changes or dangers in the environment
Deviant distraction and longer response times were found by exposure to the word stop, but deviant distraction was not found to be significant with the word press or due to intonation
While the results showed that women had in general longer reaction times, there were no gender differences found related to the deviant distraction caused by word or intonation
Summary
The detection of unexpected auditory events is of paramount importance because it can signal changes or dangers in the environment. A well-established method to experimentally measure such events is the oddball task that originates from electro-physiological work demonstrating brain responses specific to the detection of unexpected events and the automatic orienting of attention to them [3,4,5]. The general paradigm for this method entails conducting a primary task directly after the presentation of to-be-ignored stimuli, where the stimuli are composed of a high probability standard stimulus which is randomly exchanged with unique (novel) or infrequent, but repeated (deviant) “odd” stimuli. In this paradigm three specific brain patterns have been identified which are associated with.
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