A new study carried out in collaboration with our partners at the Unievrsity of Bournemouth (UK) shows that the presentation of unexpected sounds disrupt eye movements through their transient inhibition. This work is part of Fabrice Parmentier’s current nationally-funded project and follows up on the solid collaboration established with Prof. Julie Kirkby and Dr. Martin Vasilev.

Reference: Vasilev, M. R., Lowmann, M., Bills, K., Parmentier, F. B. R., & Kirkby, J. A. (2023). Unexpected sounds inhibit the movement of the eyes during reading and letter scanning. Psychophysiology, 023;00:e14389. doi: 10.1111/psyp.14389.

Abstract: Novel sounds that unexpectedly deviate from a repetitive sound sequence are well known to cause distraction. Such unexpected sounds have also been shown to cause global motor inhibition, suggesting that they trigger a neurophysiological response aimed at stopping ongoing actions. Recently, evidence from eye movements has suggested that unexpected sounds also temporarily pause the movements of the eyes during reading, though it is unclear if this effect is due to inhibition of oculomotor planning or inhibition of language processes. Here, we sought to distinguish between these two possibilities by comparing a natural reading task to a letter scanning task that involves similar oculomotor demands to reading, but no higher level lexical processing. Participants either read sentences for comprehension or scanned letter strings of these sentences for the letter ‘o’ in three auditory conditions: silence, standard, and novel sounds. The results showed that novel sounds were equally distracting in both tasks, suggesting that they generally inhibit ongoing oculomotor processes independent of lexical processing. These results suggest that novel sounds may have a global suppressive effect on eye-movement control