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).