Citation

Leiva A, Parmentier FB, Andrés P. Exp. Psychol. 2014; 62(1): 54-65.

Affiliation

Neuropsychology and Cognition Group, Department of Psychology and Research Institute for Health Sciences (iUNICS), University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Balearic Islands, Spain Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria de Palma (IdISPa), Palma, Balearic Islands, Spain

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Hogrefe Publishing)

DOI

10.1027/1618-3169/a000273

PMID

25270560

Abstract

We report the results of oddball experiments in which an irrelevant stimulus (standard, deviant) was presented before a target stimulus and the modality of these stimuli was manipulated orthogonally (visual/auditory). Experiment 1 showed that auditory deviants yielded distraction irrespective of the target's modality while visual deviants did not impact on performance. When participants were forced to attend the distractors in order to detect a rare target ("target-distractor"), auditory deviants yielded distraction irrespective of the target's modality and visual deviants yielded a small distraction effect when targets were auditory (Experiments 2 & 3). Visual deviants only produced distraction for visual targets when deviant stimuli were not visually distinct from the other distractors (Experiment 4). Our results indicate that while auditory deviants yield distraction irrespective of the targets' modality, visual deviants only do so when attended and under selective conditions, at least when irrelevant and target stimuli are temporally and perceptually decoupled.

Language: en