@article{ref1,
title="What we expect is not always what we get: evidence for both the direction-of-change and the specific-stimulus hypotheses of auditory attentional capture",
journal="PLoS one",
year="2014",
author="Nöstl, Anatole and Marsh, John E. and Sörqvist, Patrik",
volume="9",
number="11",
pages="e111997-e111997",
abstract="Participants were requested to respond to a sequence of visual targets while listening to a well-known lullaby. One of the notes in the lullaby was occasionally exchanged with a pattern deviant. Experiment 1 found that deviants capture attention as a function of the pitch difference between the deviant and the replaced/expected tone. However, when the pitch difference between the expected tone and the deviant tone is held constant, a violation to the direction-of-pitch change across tones can also capture attention (Experiment 2). Moreover, in more complex auditory environments, wherein it is difficult to build a coherent neural model of the sound environment from which expectations are formed, deviations can capture attention but it appears to matter less whether this is a violation from a specific stimulus or a violation of the current direction-of-change (Experiment 3). The results support the expectation violation account of auditory distraction and suggest that there are at least two different expectations that can be violated: One appears to be bound to a specific stimulus and the other would seem to be bound to a more global cross-stimulus rule such as the direction-of-change based on a sequence of preceding sound events. Factors like base-rate probability of tones within the sound environment might become the driving mechanism of attentional capture-rather than violated expectations-in complex sound environments.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="1932-6203",
doi="10.1371/journal.pone.0111997",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0111997"
}