The semantic aftermath of distraction by deviant sounds: Crosstalk interference is mediated by the predictability of semantic congruency

Parmentier, Fabrice B. R.; Kefauver, Miriam

doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2015.01.034

Cited by 9 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 93 publications

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“…Moreover, when attention is captured by sound, the content of the sound tends to be processed thereby potentially producing greater disruption (e.g., Escera, Yago, Corral, Corbera, & Nuñez, 2003;Marsh, Röer, Bell, & Buchner, 2014;Parmentier, Elford, Escera, Andrés, & San Miguel, 2008;Parmentier & Kefauver, 2015).…”

Section: Acoustic Unexpectedness Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although it would appear from the aforementioned studies (e.g., Monk, Fellas, & Ley, 2004;Norman & Bennett, 2014) that semantic content may be key for the appearance of the halfalogue effect (Emberson et al, 2010), it is unknown whether this is because the semantic content is unpredictable, or whether the acoustic unpredictability of the onset of the half conversation captures attention and semantic processing follows thereafter (e.g., Parmentier & Kefauver, 2015). Thus, there is no clear evidence that the semantic content of the background speech can directly disrupt the focal task: it may do so as a mere by-product of auditory attentional capture.…”

Section: Acoustic Unexpectedness Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

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Why are background telephone conversations distracting?

Marsh¹,

Ljung²,

Jahncke³

et al. 2018

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied

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Telephone conversation is ubiquitous within the office setting. Overhearing a telephone conversation-whereby only one of the two speakers is heard-is subjectively more annoying and objectively more distracting than overhearing a full conversation. The present study sought to determine whether this "halfalogue" effect is attributable to unexpected offsets and onsets within the background speech (acoustic unexpectedness) or to the tendency to predict the unheard part of the conversation (semantic [un]predictability), and whether these effects can be shielded against through top-down cognitive control. In Experiment 1, participants performed an office-related task in quiet or in the presence of halfalogue and dialogue background speech. Irrelevant speech was either meaningful or meaningless speech. The

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Section: Acoustic Unexpectedness Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Acoustic Unexpectedness Hypothesismentioning

confidence: 99%

Why are background telephone conversations distracting?

Marsh¹,

Ljung²,

Jahncke³

et al. 2018

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied

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“…Importantly, unexpected sounds also affect behavior through the involuntary appraisal of their semantic contents (e.g., Escera, Yago, Corral, Corbera, & Nuñez, 2003 ; Muller-Gass et al, 2007 ; Parmentier, Pacheco-Unguetti, & Valero, 2018 ; Shtyrov, Hauk, & Pulvermuller, 2004 ; Wetzel, Widmann, & Schröger, 2011 ). For example, response times in a left/right arrow categorization task are affected by the deviant words “left” and “right” in two ways: by virtue of these sounds violating the pattern of standard tones, and as a function of the relationship (congruent or incongruent) between the deviant words’ meaning and the visual arrows (Parmentier, 2008 ; Parmentier & Kefauver, 2015 ; Parmentier, Turner, & Elsley, 2011 ; Parmentier, Turner, & Pérez, 2014 ). While these studies testify of the involuntary semantic processing of the unexpected sounds, little research has examined whether such processing extends to their emotional content.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Parmentier

Fraga

Leiva

et al. 2019

Psychological Research

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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.

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“…The semantic effect, just like deviance distraction, is modulated by predictability, however. Indeed, Parmentier and Kefauver [ 59 ] manipulated the proportion of congruent deviant sounds “left” or “right” (.2, .5, or .8) in a left/right visual arrow categorization task and showed that participants built corresponding predictions. While the deviant sounds yielded deviance distraction in all conditions, the semantic effect (incongruent vs. congruent trials) was modulated by the proportion of congruent trials: it was eliminated when congruent trials were rare (for response times to incongruent trials were shortened by the predictability of the incongruence and response times to congruent trials, in contrast, were lengthened by the fact that the congruence violated predictions) and maximum when congruent trials were most frequent (for response times to incongruent trials were longer due to a combination of crosstalk interference and the violation of predictions and response times to congruent trials were reduced due as a result of congruency and its predictability).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The studies described in the previous section suggest that deviant sounds undergo some involuntary semantic processing and that the outcome of this processing can in turn impact on performance in the primary task [ 24 , 56 , 57 , 59 ]. In these studies, measuring the impact of the sounds’ semantic processing was achieved through the prism of the semantic congruence effect.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Food words distract the hungry: Evidence of involuntary semantic processing of task-irrelevant but biologically-relevant unexpected auditory words

2018

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Rare changes in a stream of otherwise repeated task-irrelevant sounds break through selective attention and disrupt performance in an unrelated visual task by triggering shifts of attention to and from the deviant sound (deviance distraction). Evidence indicates that the involuntary orientation of attention to unexpected sounds is followed by their semantic processing. However, past demonstrations relied on tasks in which the meaning of the deviant sounds overlapped with features of the primary task. Here we examine whether such processing is observed when no such overlap is present but sounds carry some relevance to the participants’ biological need to eat when hungry. We report the results of an experiment in which hungry and satiated participants partook in a cross-modal oddball task in which they categorized visual digits (odd/even) while ignoring task-irrelevant sounds. On most trials the irrelevant sound was a sinewave tone (standard sound). On the remaining trials, deviant sounds consisted of spoken words related to food (food deviants) or control words (control deviants). Questionnaire data confirmed state (but not trait) differences between the two groups with respect to food craving, as well as a greater desire to eat the food corresponding to the food-related words in the hungry relative to the satiated participants. The results of the oddball task revealed that food deviants produced greater distraction (longer response times) than control deviants in hungry participants while the reverse effect was observed in satiated participants. This effect was observed in the first block of trials but disappeared thereafter, reflecting semantic saturation. Our results suggest that (1) the semantic content of deviant sounds is involuntarily processed even when sharing no feature with the primary task; and that (2) distraction by deviant sounds can be modulated by the participants’ biological needs.

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The semantic aftermath of distraction by deviant sounds: Crosstalk interference is mediated by the predictability of semantic congruency

Cited by 9 publications

References 93 publications

Why are background telephone conversations distracting?

Why are background telephone conversations distracting?

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

Food words distract the hungry: Evidence of involuntary semantic processing of task-irrelevant but biologically-relevant unexpected auditory words

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