Uncovering Auditory Distraction through a Behavioral and Eye-Tracking Combined Approach

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Efficient mental performance is critically dependent on attentional selectivity: the ability to couple goal-related properties of incoming stimulation to the control of action while preventing goal-unrelated stimuli from doing so. Yet, whereas such selectivity would confer the advantage of being able to focus on a chosen goal, its rigid application would also mean a maladaptive lack of responsiveness to changing circumstances, some of which could signal danger or opportunity. Hence, the cognitive system must remain permeable to irrelevant stimulation in light of possible changes in environmental conditions or behavioral goals, lest the organism be rendered unresponsive to unexpected and potentially significant events. The benefits of permeability come, however, with the price of distractibility, whereby irrelevant stimuli can compromise the efficacy of goal- driven behavior. The central purpose of the proposed research is to uncover the underlying cognitive processes involved in striking the optimal balance between selectivity and permeability in the presence of irrelevant sound. Whereas some researchers ascribe the disruptive impact of unattended sound exclusively to attentional capture (the involuntary orienting of attention by a sound that deviates from the recent auditory past), others propose that auditory distraction can also ensue from competition-for-action (the disruption of deliberate processing by the obligatory processing of sound). This research program seeks to establish further key differences between the different forms of auditory distraction by focusing on how auditory deviants disrupt behavior and to pinpoint the origin(s) of such disruption through the innovative combination of behavioral and oculomotor data. The characteristics and nature of the to-be-ignored sound and the focal task will be systematically manipulated in order to: 1) establish pupillometry as an index of auditory attentional capture by deviant sounds; 2) specify the cognitive mechanisms responsible for the disturbance of cognitive functioning by deviant sounds; 3) determine the extent to which unattended sound is processed; 4) determine whether attention-capturing deviants take control over attentional mechanisms that are overt and/or covert in nature.