The surprising robustness of visual search against concurrent auditory distraction.

Abstract

People often complain about distraction by irrelevant sounds that reportedly hamper performance on concurrent visual tasks demanding the allocation of focused attention toward relevant stimuli, such as processing street signs during driving. To study this everyday issue experimentally, we devised a cross-modal distraction paradigm, inspired by a standard visual-distraction paradigm (additional-singleton paradigm) that is highly sensitive to measure interference on the allocation of attention. In a visual-search pop-out task, participants reported whether a salient target (a tilted bar) was present or absent, while a completely irrelevant, but salient auditory distractor accompanied some trials. To our surprise, the results revealed no notable distraction on visual-search performance (controlled for speed-accuracy tradeoffs). Reliable auditory distraction failed to occur even when the distractor was a (highly salient) auditory oddball or was additionally presented with a temporal advantage of 300 ms. However, when the auditory modality was made relevant globally while maintaining its irrelevance to the visual-search task, we finally observed the expected interference effect. Public Significance StatementDistraction by irrelevant sounds while looking for relevant visual information (visual search) is a common experience, but little is known regarding the conditions under which such distraction occurs (or does not occur). The present study demonstrates that visual search is robust to distraction by irrelevant auditory stimuli unless observers have to additionally monitor information from the auditory modality for a secondary task, indicating that our attentional system can block auditory stimuli from interfering with visual search as long as the auditory modality is completely irrelevant. By inducing auditory distraction on visual search, our experimental design opens new avenues for research on the nature and handling of auditory interference that links more closely with the vast scientific literature on visual distraction.

Multifaceted consequences of visual distraction during natural behaviour

“…Distraction during natural behaviour, however, can take various forms: once we found the sugar, we might find ourselves in front of multiple mixing bowls, only some to which we need to add the sugar. In addition to visual distraction, other forms of distraction may also be present, such as auditory stimuli (e.g., hearing your dog bark) 80 – 83 or interruptions through task-irrelevant events (e.g., getting a call) 3 , 66 , 67 , 84 . Our study focused on one particularly powerful form of distractor interference and future research is necessary to uncover consequences of other types of distraction.…”

Multifaceted consequences of visual distraction during natural behaviour

“…Distraction during natural behaviour, however, can take various forms: once we found the sugar, we might find ourselves in front of multiple mixing bowls, only some to which we need to add the sugar. In addition to visual distraction, other forms of distraction may also be present, such as auditory stimuli (e.g., hearing your dog bark) [80][81][82][83] or interruptions through task-irrelevant events (e.g., getting a call) 3,66,67,84 . Our study focused on one particularly powerful form of distractor interference and future research is necessary to uncover consequences of other types of distraction.…”