Distraction by deviant sounds: disgusting and neutral words capture attention to the same extent

Abstract

Several studies have argued that words evoking negative emotions, such as disgust, grab attention more than neutral words, and leave traces in memory that are more persistent. However, these conclusions are typically based on tasks requiring participants to process the semantic content of these words in a voluntarily manner. We sought to compare the involuntary attention grabbing power of disgusting and neutral words using them as rare and unexpected auditory distractors in a cross-modal oddball task, and then probing the participants’ memory for these stimuli in a surprise recognition task. Frequentist and Bayesian analyses converged to show that, compared to a standard tone, disgusting and neutral auditory words produced significant but equivalent levels of distraction in a visual categorization task, that they elicited comparable levels of memory discriminability in the incidental recognition task, and that the participants’ individual sensitivity to disgust did not influence the results. Our results suggest that distraction by unexpected words is not modulated by their emotional valence, at least when these words are task-irrelevant and are temporally and perceptually decoupled from the target stimuli.

Positive and negative mood states do not influence cross-modal auditory distraction in the serial-recall paradigm

“…This holds true even for emotional mood states with enhanced arousal (Experiment 4). The results thus support the conceptualization of auditory distraction as a primarily stimulus-driven process that is prevalent in related fields of research [e.g., 3 , 4 ]. Specifically, the results are in line with an automatic-capture account according to which both the auditory-deviant effect and the changing-state effect arise in an automatic fashion from the obligatory perceptual processing of changes and deviations in the to-be ignored auditory channel [ 8 , 21 , 50 ].…”

“…Even though auditory distraction has been conceptualized as being primarily determined by properties of the to-be-ignored information (e.g., the degree to which it deviates from a previous train of stimuli; see, for example, [ 3 , 4 ]), it seems possible that auditory distraction is determined by emotional state. It has often been postulated that distraction by auditory stimuli is not only detrimental, but may serve an important adaptive function [e.g., 5 – 7 ].…”

Covert detection of own-name and semantic violations in task-irrelevant speech, in a realistic Virtual Café

“…The basic rationale is that finding an indication for detection of semantic violations, implies that the entire speech was monitored for its semantic content, in line with late-selection models of attention (Parmentier et al, 2018). As in the case of detecting ones’ own name in task-irrelevant speech, behavioral studies offer conflicting results regarding the degree to which the presence of semantic violations in task irrelevant speech interfere with performance of a main task (Bentin, Kutas and Hillyard, 1995; Röer et al ., 2019, 2021;, vs. Deacon, 2000; Aydelott, Jamaluddin and Nixon Pearce, 2015; Röer et al ., 2017; Parmentier et al ., 2020; Röer and Cowan, 2021). Hence here, too, monitoring neural and physiological responses to semantic violations in the barista-stream provides a more direct, and ecologically relevant, metric.…”

Emotional distraction and facilitation across sense and time.

“…As previously noted, these different emotions may not be equivalent in terms of their impact on task performance. For instance, sadness has been shown to produce longer response times than anger (Hjärtström et al, 2019), and the effect of disgusting sounds may not differ from that of neutral stimuli (Parmentier et al, 2019). Future work in this area should examine these emotions separately to more accurately determine their impact on task performance.…”

“…For example, in some cross-modal oddball tasks (i.e., tasks that contain a more frequent “standard” stimulus and a more infrequent “oddball” stimulus), emotional auditory stimuli produce greater distraction effects on visual task performance than neutral tones (Hjärtström et al, 2019), whereas others have shown that emotional sounds produce reduced distraction effects relative to neutral environmental sounds (e.g., Krusemark & Li, 2011; Max et al, 2015). In addition, the effects may depend on the specific emotion examined (Parmentier et al, 2019).…”