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

Anatole Nöstl, John E Marsh and Patrik Sörqvist

PLOS ONE, 2014, vol. 9, issue 11, 1-7

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.

Date: 2014
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0111997

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0111997

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