Citation

van der Heiden RMA, Janssen CP, Donker SF, Kenemans JL. Acta Psychol. 2020; 205: e103058.

Affiliation

Utrecht University, Department of Experimental Psychology, Utrecht, the Netherlands; Helmholtz Institute, Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2020, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.actpsy.2020.103058

PMID

32199246

Abstract

In this study we evaluate how cognitive load affects susceptibility to auditory signals. Previous research has used the frontal P3 (fP3) event related potential response to auditory novel stimuli as an index for susceptibility to auditory signals. This work demonstrated that tasks that induce cognitive load such as visual and manual tasks, reduced susceptibility. It is however unknown whether cognitive load without visual or manual components also reduces susceptibility. To investigate this, we induced cognitive load by means of the verb generation task, in which participants need to think about a verb that matches a noun. The susceptibility to auditory signals was measured by recording the event related potential in response to a successively presented oddball probe stimulus at 3 different inter-stimulus intervals, 0 ms, 200 ms or 400 ms after the offset of the noun from the verb generation task. An additional control baseline condition, in which oddball response was probed without a verb generation task, was also included.

RESULTS show that the cognitive load associated with the verb task reduces fP3 response (and associated auditory signal susceptibility) compared to baseline, independent of presentation interval. This suggests that not only visual and motor processing, but also cognitive load without visual or manual components, can reduce susceptibility to auditory signals and alerts.

Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Language: en

Keywords

Cognitive load; Frontal P3; Oddball; P300; Susceptibility; Verb generation task