Cross-modal Oddball Research Articles

Why are auditory novels distracting? Contrasting the roles of novelty, violation of expectation and stimulus change

Past studies show that novel auditory stimuli, presented in the context of an otherwise repeated sound, capture participants’ attention away from a focal task, resulting in measurable behavioral distraction. Novel sounds are traditionally defined as rare and unexpected but past studies have not sought to disentangle these concepts directly. Using a cross-modal oddball task, we contrasted these aspects orthogonally by manipulating the base rate and conditional probabilities of sound events. We report for the first time that behavioral distraction does not result from a sound’s novelty per se but from the violation of the cognitive system’s expectation based on the learning of conditional probabilities and, to some extent, the occurrence of a perceptual change from one sound to another.

A behavioral study of distraction by vibrotactile novelty.

Past research has demonstrated that the occurrence of unexpected task-irrelevant changes in the auditory or visual sensory channels captured attention in an obligatory fashion, hindering behavioral performance in ongoing auditory or visual categorization tasks and generating orientation and re-orientation electrophysiological responses. We report the first experiment extending the behavioral study of cross-modal distraction to tactile novelty. Using a vibrotactile-visual cross-modal oddball task and a bespoke hand-arm vibration device, we found that participants were significantly slower at categorizing the parity of visually presented digits following a rare and unexpected change in vibrotactile stimulation (novelty distraction), and that this effect extended to the subsequent trial (postnovelty distraction). These results are in line with past research on auditory and visual novelty and fit the proposition of common and amodal cognitive mechanisms for the involuntary detection of change.

Distraction by vibro-tactile and auditory novel stimuli

Event Abstract Back to Event Distraction by vibro-tactile and auditory novel stimuli Fabrice Parmentier1* and Jessica Ljungberg2 1 University of the Balearic Islands, Spain 2 Umea University, Sweden Past studies have shown that unexpected changes in a stream of auditory distracters capture attention in an ineluctable manner and delay responses in an ongoing categorization task. We extend the study of this phenomenon by reporting a within-participant comparison of novelty distraction in the tactile and auditory modalities using vibrotactile-visual and auditory-visual cross-modal oddball tasks. The results showed a number of functional similarities between the tactile and auditory modalities: a negative impact of distracter novelty on performance in the ongoing visual task (novelty distraction), distraction on the subsequent trial (post-novelty distraction), and a similar decrease of these effects across blocks. Keywords: Attention, Novel stimuli Conference: XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI), Palma, Mallorca, Spain, 25 Sep - 29 Sep, 2011. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Poster Sessions: Neurophysiology of Cognition and Attention Citation: Parmentier F and Ljungberg J (2011). Distraction by vibro-tactile and auditory novel stimuli. Conference Abstract: XI International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience (ICON XI). doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2011.207.00314 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 22 Nov 2011; Published Online: 28 Nov 2011. * Correspondence: Dr. Fabrice Parmentier, University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Mallorca, Spain, fabrice.parmentier@uib.es Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Fabrice Parmentier Jessica Ljungberg Google Fabrice Parmentier Jessica Ljungberg Google Scholar Fabrice Parmentier Jessica Ljungberg PubMed Fabrice Parmentier Jessica Ljungberg Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Is two better than one? A cross-modal oddball paradigm reveals greater sensitivity of the P300 to emotional face-voice associations

Objective Studies exploring neurophysiological correlates of main psychiatric disorders have commonly used event-related potentials (ERP) during a visual or an auditory oddball task. The main results concern modulations of the P3b amplitude and/or latency. The present study aims to increase the clinical sensitivity of these P3b modulations by using a more ecological oddball design, using synchronized pairs of audio-visual emotional stimuli. Method Two groups of healthy participants, one composed of controls and the other of students displaying anxious and depressive tendencies completed visual, auditory and audio-visual (cross-modal) oddball tasks, in which they had to detect deviant happy and sad stimuli among neutral ones as quickly as possible. Behavioral performance and P3b ERP data were analyzed. Results Subjects displaying anxious and depressive tendencies exhibited lower P3b amplitude than the controls, but only in the cross-modal oddball task. Conclusions Although the two groups of subjects differed in their levels of co-morbid anxiety and depression, unimodal visual and auditory oddball tasks did not allow us to detect this difference by P3b amplitude modulations, but the cross-modal task did. Significance These results suggest that a cross-modal oddball design should be used in future studies to increase the sensitivity of the P300 amplitude differences between healthy participants and those with clinical symptoms.

The involuntary capture of attention by novel feature pairings: A study of voice—location integration in auditory sensory memory

Past researchers of the integration of information in memory have typically required participants to attend to and/or commit to memory the stimuli conveying distinct features, rendering difficult the examination of whether the maintenance of the feature pairings can occur involuntarily. To address this issue, the integration of voice and location information in auditory sensory memory was measured using a cross-modal oddball task, in which task-irrelevant auditory deviants are known to capture attention in an involuntary fashion. Participants categorized visual digits presented shortly after to-be-ignored sounds. These sounds consisted in the same phoneme played simultaneously in both ears but in different voices (female in one ear, male in the other). On most trials, the pairing of voice to location was constant (standard sound). On rare and unpredictable trials, the voices swapped locations (deviant sound). In line with past work on attention capture by auditory novelty, the participants were significantly slower to judge the visual digits following the deviant sound, indicating the involuntary encoding of the links between voice and location in auditory memory. These results suggest that voices and locations are integrated in memory and that this binding occurs in conditions in which participants do not intend to commit any information to memory.

The cognitive locus of distraction by acoustic novelty in the cross-modal oddball task

Unexpected stimuli are often able to distract us away from a task at hand. The present study seeks to explore some of the mechanisms underpinning this phenomenon. Studies of involuntary attention capture using the oddball task have repeatedly shown that infrequent auditory changes in a series of otherwise repeating sounds trigger an automatic response to the novel or deviant stimulus. This attention capture has been shown to disrupt participants’ behavioral performance in a primary task, even when distractors and targets are asynchronous and presented in distinct sensory modalities. This distraction effect is generally considered as a by-product of the capture of attention by the novel or deviant stimulus, but the exact cognitive locus of this effect and the interplay between attention capture and target processing has remained relatively ignored. The present study reports three behavioral experiments using a cross-modal oddball task to examine whether the distraction triggered by auditory novelty affects the processing of the target stimuli. Our results showed that variations in the demands placed on the visual analysis (Experiment 1) or categorical processing of the target (Experiment 2) did not impact on distraction. Instead, the cancellation of distraction by the presentation of an irrelevant visual stimulus presented immediately before the visual target (Experiment 3) suggested that distraction originated in the shifts of attention occurring between attention capture and the onset of the target processing. Possible accounts of these shifts are discussed.