Project proposal on distraction by unexpected sounds is awarded national funding

The research project, approved for funding by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (State Research Agency), will study auditory distraction.

The project will be led by Fabrice Parmentier with the participation and support of a number of distinguished collaborators: János Horváth (Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Budapest, Hungary), Martin Vasilev and Julie Kirkby (Bournemouth University, UK), and Alicia Leiva (University of the Balearic Islands).

The project, entitled “Extending our knowledge of distraction by unexpected sounds” will officially start in September 2021 and run for 4 years. The original work plan includes 22 empirical experiments that will investigate several aspects of auditory distraction, ranging from fundamental cognitive mechanisms to contextual variables and motoric aspects.

The project was highly rated by 4 expert reviewers and received average scores of 93.64% for quality and feasibility, 92.5% for the project leader ‘s and collaborators’ track record, and 91.97% for expected impact. The overall project score is 93/100.

The project is to be funded to the tune of 145,200 Euros and will include, in addition, one PhD studentship (estimated value of about 91,000).

Aging increases cross-modal distraction by unexpected sounds: Controlling for response speed

Dr Alicia Leiva

Our latest paper on aging and deviance distraction has been accepted for publication in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience and WILL come out shortly.

This study by Leiva, Andrés and Parmentier uses Bayesian statistics and Bayesian estimation methods to revisit the results of five past studies and shows that aging increases distraction by unexpected sounds in cross-modal but not in uni-modal oddball tasks, even when controlling for age-related variations in baseline response speed. Bayesian estimation provides credible estimate of the size of the aging effect, showing that this distraction is about twice as large in older than in young adults.

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Proportional Measure of Distraction (PMD) for response times (RTs). Comparison of young and older adults in cross-modal oddball tasks. Relative to standard sounds, unexpected sounds increase RTs by 6.8% in older adults, against 2.9% in young adults.

Reference: Leiva, A., Andrés, P., & Parmentier, F. B. R. (2021) Aging Increases Cross-Modal Distraction by Unexpected Sounds: Controlling for Response Speed. Front. Aging Neurosci. 13:733388. doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2021.733388

Abstract: It is well established that task-irrelevant sounds deviating from an otherwise predictable auditory sequence capture attention and disrupt ongoing performance by delaying responses in the ongoing task. In visual tasks, larger distraction by unexpected sounds (deviance distraction) has been reported in older than in young adults. However, past studies based this conclusion on the comparisons of absolute response times and did not control for the general slowing typically observed in older adults. Hence, it remains unclear whether this difference in deviance distraction between the two age groups reflects a genuine effect of aging or a proportional effect of similar size in both groups. We addressed this issue by using a proportional measure of distraction to reanalyze the data from four past studies and used Bayesian estimation to generate credible estimates of the age-related difference in deviance distraction and its effect size. The results were unambiguous: older adults exhibited greater deviance distraction than young adults when controlling for baseline response speed (in each individual study and in the combined data set). Bayesian estimation revealed a proportional lengthening of response times by unexpected sounds that was about twice as large in older than in young adults (corresponding to a large statistical effect size). A similar analysis was carried out on the proportion of correct responses and produced converging results. Finally, an additional Bayesian analysis comparing data from cross-modal and uni-modal studies confirmed the selective effect of aging on distraction in the first and not the second. Overall, our study shows that older adults performing a visual categorization task do exhibit greater distraction by unexpected sounds than young adults and that this effect is not explicable by age-related general slowing.

Top mark for undergraduate dissertation: Congratulations to Laura Gallego!

Congratulations to Laura Gallego for obtaining the “matrícula de honor” (the top mark reserved for the very best performance) for her undergraduate dissertation

Laura Gallego

A panel of three academics awarded a mark of 9.7/10 to Laura for a dissertation focused on the role of visual context in auditory distraction. The dissertation is entitled “¿Puede el contexto visual modular la distracción auditiva? (“Can the visual context modulate auditory distraction?”). The mark was awarded on the basis of her written dissertation and an excellent oral presentation. The dissertation reports the results of a solid empirical experiment in which participants categorized visual targets while ignoring irrelevant sounds and background pictures. The results of this original piece of work unambiguously demonstrate that the cognitive system computes auditory sensory predictions based on probabilistic relationship between task-irrelevant sounds and visual background. Put simply, the human brain quickly learns to predict sounds based on the context in which they are experienced, making sound more or less distracting depending on the extent to which they are surprising in a given context.

The work, supervised by Fabrice Parmentier, builds upon the literature on deviance distraction and opens new avenues for research in this field. We expect to complement and write up this work for publication in the near future.

Laura has now completed her degree in psychology, which she did with great success and - an unprecedented event among our students - with a publication in one of the very best journals in experimental psychology! (more information here).

Congratulations, Laura!

Is the expression of implicit sequence learning free from inhibitory control?

A recent transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) study in which participated Alicia Leiva with colleagues from the University of Granada and the University of Santiago de Compostela has just been accepted for publication in Cortex.

The study reviews the role of activity in cortical areas underpinning inhibitory control and report the results of a new experiment seeking to examine the role of these areas in the expression of implicitly acquired sequences.

Reference: Prutean, N., Martín-Arévalo, E., Leiva, A., Jiménez, L., Vallesi, A., & Lupiáñez, J. (in press). The causal role of inhibitory control on the acquisition and expression of implicit learning: state of the art. Cortex.

Abstract: Implicit learning refers to the incidental acquisition and expression of knowledge that is not accompanied by full awareness of its contents. Implicit sequence learning (ISL) represents one of the most useful paradigms to investigate these processes. In this paradigm, participants are usually instructed to respond to the location of a target that moves regularly through a set of possible locations. Although participants are not informed about the existence of a sequence, they eventually learn it implicitly, as attested by the costs observed when this sequence is violated in a reduced set of control trials. Interestingly, the expression of this learning decreases immediately after a control trial, in a way that resembles the adjustments triggered in response to incongruent trials in interference tasks. These effects have been attributed to a control network involving dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and cingulate (ACC) structures. In the present work, we reviewed a group of recent studies which had inhibited DLPFC top-down control by means of non-invasive brain stimulation to increase the acquisition of ISL. In addition, as no previous study has investigated the effect inhibiting top-down control on releasing the automatic expression of ISL, we present a pre-registered – yet exploratory – study in which an inhibitory continuous theta burst stimulation protocol was applied over an anterior-ventral portion of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) highly interconnected with the ACC, and whose activity has been specifically linked to motor control (i.e., Right DLPFC, n=10 or the Left DLPFC, n=10), compared to active Vertex stimulation (n=10). Contrary to our hypotheses, the preliminary results did not show evidence for the involvement of such region in the expression of ISL. We discussed the results in the context of the set of contradictory findings reported in the systematic review.

Unexpected sounds distract us even when our task is predictable

A new study by Fabrice Parmentier and Laura Gallego has just been accepted for publication in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. While previous work has shown that the predictability of the unexpected sounds reduces distraction, this study is the first to show that the predictability of the task stimuli and responses does not protect participants from auditory distraction.

With an Impact Factor of 5.536 in 2020, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review is the 6th best journal in Experimental Psychology in the world.

View the paper on Springer Nature’s Sharedit.

This work formed part of Laura Gallego’s placement as student collaborator working with Fabrice Parmentier.

Abstract: Past studies show that novel, task-irrelevant, auditory stimuli, presented in the context of an otherwise repeated standard sound, capture participants’ attention away from a focal task, resulting in behavioral distraction. While evidence has shown that making novel sounds predictable reduces or eliminates distraction, it remains unknown whether predictable target stimuli can also shield participants from novelty distraction. Using a serial reaction time task, we installed the learning of a sequence of target stimuli before testing the impact of novel sounds on performance for this sequence compared to a new one. In the learning phase, participants pressed response buttons corresponding to visual cues appearing in one of four spatial locations arranged horizontally. Unbeknownst to participants, the sequence of locations followed a pattern during several blocks before being replaced by a new pattern. The data provided solid evidence of sequence learning for the repeated sequence. In the auditory distraction phase, auditory distractors were presented immediately before each visual target. Novel sounds lengthened response times compared to the standard sound (novelty distraction), equally for learned and new sequences. We conclude that the anticipation of target stimuli and responses does not shield participants from novelty distraction and that the latter is an obligatory attentional effect.

Reference: Parmentier, F. B. R., & Gallego, L. (2020). Is deviance distraction immune to the prior sequential learning of stimuli and responses? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 27, 490-497.

Latest update: This work has been accepted for oral presentation at the 62d Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, in New Orleans, USA, 4-7 November 2021.