Distraction by deviant sounds during reading: An eye-movement study

Abstract

Oddball studies have shown that sounds unexpectedly deviating from an otherwise repeated sequence capture attention away from the task at hand. While such distraction is typically regarded as potentially important in everyday life, previous work has so far not examined how deviant sounds affect performance on more complex daily tasks. In this study, we developed a new method to examine whether deviant sounds can disrupt reading performance by recording participants’ eye movements. Participants read single sentences in silence and while listening to task-irrelevant sounds. In the latter condition, a 50-ms sound was played contingent on the fixation of five target words in the sentence. On most occasions, the same tone was presented (standard sound), whereas on rare and unexpected occasions it was replaced by white noise (deviant sound). The deviant sound resulted in significantly longer fixation durations on the target words relative to the standard sound. A time-course analysis showed that the deviant sound began to affect fixation durations around 180 ms after fixation onset. Furthermore, deviance distraction was not modulated by the lexical frequency of target words. In summary, fixation durations on the target words were longer immediately after the presentation of the deviant sound, but there was no evidence that it interfered with the lexical processing of these words. The present results are in line with the recent proposition that deviant sounds yield a temporary motor suppression and suggest that deviant sounds likely inhibit the programming of the next saccade.

Distraction by auditory novelty during reading: Evidence for disruption in saccade planning, but not saccade execution

“…Furthermore, Vasilev et al (2019) presented a 50 ms sound when readers fixated five target words in a sentence. Participants either heard five standard sounds (a sine wave) or four standard and one deviant sound (a burst of white noise).…”

“…Unexpected sounds lead to an immediate increase in fixation durations during reading (Vasilev, Parmentier et al, 2019), which may occur due to global transient inhibition of motor responses (Wessel & Aron, 2013, 2017. Therefore, the increase in fixation durations may be due to saccadic inhibition during the planning stages of the next saccade.…”

“…While novelty distraction is typically measured from response times using forced-choice categorization tasks, recent evidence has suggested that deviant sounds may also affect oculomotor control (Graupner et al, 2007; Vasilev et al, 2019; Widmann et al, 2014; see also Marois & Vachon, 2018; Wetzel et al, 2016 for pupil dilation responses). For example, Graupner et al (2007) presented visual and auditory distractors at every fifth fixation in a scene viewing task.…”

Involuntary shifts of spatial attention contribute to distraction - Evidence from oscillatory alpha power and reaction time data

“…In a task in which participants attend and respond to a target, behavioral distraction is defined as the slowing of responses following the presentation of a task-distracting event. This is caused by an involuntary (stimulus driven, bottom-up, or exogenous) shift of attention from the task towards the deviant, which is thought to reflect a time penalty due to attention shifting to the deviant and then back to the task (Parmentier et al, 2008; Schröger, 1996) and appears related to a transient inhibition of actions (Dutra et al, 2018; Vasilev et al, 2019; Wessel and Aron, 2017).…”

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

“…Task-irrelevant stimuli that unexpectedly differ from an otherwise structured or repeated sequence of stimuli (deviant among standard stimuli) capture attention and yield behavioral distraction in an unrelated ongoing task (e.g., Bendixen et al, 2010 ; Escera, Alho, Winkler, & Näätänen, 1998 ; Parmentier, 2014 ; Parmentier, Vasilev, & Andrés, 2018 ; Schröger, 1996 ; Schröger & Wolff, 1998b ; Vasilev, Parmentier, Angele, & Kirkby, 2018 ). While this type of effect has been reported across various sensory modalities (e.g., Berti, 2008 ; Berti & Schröger, 2003 ; Boll & Berti, 2009 ; Li, Parmentier, & Zhang, 2013 ; Ljungberg, Parmentier, Leiva, & Vega, 2012 ; Parmentier, 2016 ; Parmentier, Ljungberg, Elsley, & Lindkvist, 2011 ; Roeber, Widmann, & Schröger, 2003 ), the phenomenon has been most abundantly studied with auditory distractors.…”