Editorial: Distraction of attention by sound

Dear Readers,

I have to start this editorial note by expressing my grati-

tude to Prof. Lars-Göran Nilsson for inviting me to the

exciting and honorable quest of assembling the very first

special issue in the history of PsyCh Journal, on the topic of

auditory distraction and attention. There was never a ques-

tion about the choice of theme: Distraction of attention by

sound is a research area which branches into many fields and

methods, from the theoretical to the applied. This made the

task particularly challenging yet very intriguing. In this issue

you will find a smorgasbord of studies. The contributions

cover very different theoretical issues in the distraction of

attention by sound, approaching the subject through an array

of distinct angles and adopting a diversity of research

methods. The invited papers contribute their own unique

scientific pieces to the puzzle of understanding the distrac-

tion of attention by sound. I am extremely happy to announce

that some of the very best researchers in the field of auditory

distraction have contributed to this issue, creating a broad

spectrum of both empirical studies and summaries of exist-

ing research within the field. In this foreword to the special

issue, I would like to introduce the authors and give a brief

overview of each of their contributions. I hope you will enjoy

reading these highly scientific and pedagogical papers as

much as I did.

The first paper is authored by Bill Macken of the School of

Psychology, Cardiff University, U.K. In this paper, Macken

presents a very pedagogical and exciting summary of the

field of auditory distraction in relation to perceptual organi-

zation. In his article, Macken argues that the topic of

auditory perceptual organization is key to understanding dis-

traction caused by to-be-ignored sounds. He discusses the

role of auditory streaming and its impact on performance in

an ongoing task, comparing results from his research group

with findings from other studies. Macken reviews evidence

showing that neither the intensity nor even the semantic

content of to-be-ignored sound is as important for under-

standing the mechanisms responsible for producing distrac-

tion to an ongoing task as is an understanding of the

perceptual organization of sound. He states that the capacity

of an irrelevant sound to be processed and, in some cases,

distracting depends largely on whether the auditory system

perceives the incoming sound as belonging to the same, or to

another, auditory object within the focus of attention.

Macken shows that distraction relies, for example, on

whether the irrelevant sound is perceived as part of a pre-

dictable perceptual stream, or as deviating from sounds pre-

dictable for that stream. To support his argument, Macken

draws on results regarding the predictability of sounds, the

acoustic changes in sounds, and the saliency of deviating

sounds and glides.

The second piece of work is written by Danielle A. Lutfi-

Proctor and Emily Elliott from the Department of Psychol-

ogy at the Louisiana State University, U.S., and Nelson

Cowan, from the Department of Psychological Sciences,

University of Missouri-Columbia, U.S. The theme of this

paper is auditory and visual distraction in a cross-modal

Stroop task. This task differs from the traditional Stroop

task in which the target and distractor dimensions are inte-

grated, but is a well-established method in this field of

research. The members of this research group have long

experience in this kind of study and are well-known for

their excellent scientific contributions. In this engaging

article, Lufti-Proctor and colleagues present two experi-

ments that are an extension of their previous work, drawing

on a theoretical base from earlier findings by this group

whereby interference from visual targets (i.e. @ symbols,

squares, and Xs) are studied as opposed to the traditional

presentation of written words. Within their article, charac-

teristics such as the amount of color and semantic and pho-

nological properties of the visual stimuli were manipulated

whilst participants were exposed to spoken distractor color-

words (red, blue and green) presented via headphones. The

aim was to extend the findings from the cross-modal Stroop

task by adding a third dimension, thereby attempting

to characterize and differentiate interference with color

naming performance from interference produced by color-

word auditory distractors. The authors show that a manipu-

lation of the visual targets has little or no effect on

interference in a cross-modal Stroop task compared to a

traditional visual Stroop task. However, they also report that

irrelevant to-be-ignored auditory information is much

harder to filter out, thereby having a larger impact on

task-performance.

PsyCh Journal 3 (2014): 1–3DOI: 10.1002/pchj.54

bs_bs_banner

© 2014 The Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd

Rob Hughes of Royal Holloway, at the University of

London in the U.K., is author of the third paper. This is an

interesting and comprehensive review in which he describes

the most recent findings on the topic of involuntary attention

capture by sound. His paper focuses mainly on understand-

ings of the mechanisms underpinning auditory distraction

that are obtained with short-term memory tasks such as

serial recall and the missing item task. Hughes argues that

in the context of short-term memory, auditory distraction

comes in two functionally distinct forms. The first is

“interference-by-process” in which the involuntary process-

ing of irrelevant sound clashes with the processing of to-

be-remembered items in the focal task. The sound feature

causing this type of disruption is an acoustic change from

one sound element to the next (as also discussed in the

contribution by Macken). The second is attention capture.

This capture effect is interpreted more as a top-down process

causing a momentarily disengagement of attentional control

away from the focal task and is crucially independent of the

cognitive processes involved. The sound characteristics in

this type of design involve presenting an unexpected sound–

such as a change of voice–within a sequence in which all of

the other elements share acoustic features. The unexpected

sound causes a violation of expectation that captures atten-

tion and thereby produces distraction. The discrepancy

between these two distinct effects of auditory distraction

has formed empirical support for the duplex-mechanism

account. The distinctions between interference by process

and attentional capture are framed throughout the paper by,

for example, highlighting the role of task sensitivity, differ-

ential cognitive control, and the role of expectations.

The fourth paper in this special issue is written by Patrik

Sörqvist, from the Department of Building, Energy and

Environmental Engineering at the University of Gävle and

also with Linnaeus Centre HEAD, Swedish Institute for Dis-

ability Research, Linköping University, both in Sweden, and

his colleague Jerker Rönnberg, from the Department of

Behavioral Sciences and Learning, Linköping University,

Sweden. One of the main goals of this paper was to update an

earlier review by Sörqvist from 2010 in which he discussed

the mechanisms behind individual differences and perfor-

mance in a focal task during exposure to to-be-ignored

sounds. In this novel review, working memory capacity is

discussed as an important explanation for the observed

effects of distracting sounds in relation to age differences,

attention deficit disorders, hearing impairment, the role of

load or task difficulty on distraction and locus of attention,

personality and preferences (which is an interesting para-

graph to read so you know how to answer your students when

they ask you whether it is better to study with or without

their preferred music playing in the background). A neural

explanation is suggested and outlined for the relationship

between working memory capacity and distraction. Finally,

at the end of the paper the authors propose a neurocognitive

task-engagement/distraction trade-off model (TEDTOFF) in

which they summarize the existing knowledge in this field

and propose several directions for future research.

The fifth paper is an empirical study authored by John

Marsh of the School of Psychology at the University of

Central Lancashire, U.K., in collaboration with Jan Röer,

Raoul Bell, and Axel Buchner from the Department

of Experimental Psychology, Heinrich-Heine-Universität

Düsseldorf in Germany. These collaborators conducted two

well-designed experiments to investigate the role of predict-

ability in a to-be-ignored auditory distractor sequence on the

disruption of performance in a serial recall task. In this study

the authors show that a simple predictable canonical sequence

(1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9) as compared with a random-unpredictable

sequence, or a random-repeated sequence, produces compa-

rable disruption to serial recall performance compared to a

quiet condition. However, a deviant–an item repetition–added

to the predictable sequence (1 2 3 4 5 5 6 7 8 9) produced

greater disruption than an item repetition added to a random

sequence (4 8 2 9 5 5 7 3 1). Interestingly the distracting effect

showed a transient pattern: Significant distraction only

occurred during the first occasions the deviant was presented

in the context of the serial recall task. The authors conclude

that expectations for the to-be-ignored sound could have

adjusted quickly, which in turn led to habituation of the

so-called orienting response. Another neat aspect of Marsh

and colleagues’ article is that they are able to address the

tricky question of whether the post-categorical properties of

irrelevant speech are represented regardless of whether they

interfere with serial short-term memory, or whether they are

only represented and interfere when the focal task requires

post-categorical processing. Through a clever contrast

between the changing-state effect and the deviation effect,

Marsh and colleagues were able to show that the post-

categorical features of irrelevant speech are represented inde-

pendently of the focal task process. I believe this finding,

which demonstrates that post-categorical properties of irrel-

evant speech only interfere when there is some deviation from

the expected sequence, coheres nicely with the duplex model

discussed by Hughes in the current volume.

2 Editorial: Distraction of attention by sound

© 2014 The Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd

Nicole Wetzel and Erich Schröger from the University of

Leipzig in Germany author the sixth and last paper in this

special issue. This paper takes important strides towards

framing and explaining the scientific cornerstone of elec-

trophysiological findings in the field of unexpected audi-

tory distraction in children when using the oddball

paradigm. The authors have reviewed the area and intro-

duce a three-stage model explaining the distraction of

attention process in which they include and describe

studies analyzing the event-related potential (ERP) compo-

nent, mismatch negativity (MMN; an automatic novelty-

detection response), the P3a (an involuntary orientation

response to the distracting event) and the reorientation

negativity (RON; typically the orientation back of attention

towards a task at hand) or late discriminative negativity

(LDN). Even though studies of developmental behavioral

distraction effects are scarce, the existing studies in the

field are discussed, and some of the findings emanate from

the authors’ own lab. The development of involuntary

attention and behavioral distraction is efficiently summa-

rized in a table, revealing a lack of knowledge about behav-

ioral distraction and the resistance of behavioral distraction

from fetal age and upwards to the end of adolescence.

Overall, however, the authors conclude that there is some

support for the idea that distraction by unexpected auditory

events decreases with age.

As such a short summary can hardly do justice to this

collection in the rich field of research on the distraction of

attention by sound, I now urge the readers to examine each

contribution in turn.

Jessica K. Ljungberg, Guest EditorDepartment of Psychology, Umeå University,

Umeå, Sweden

School of Psychology, Cardiff University,

Cardiff, U.K.

PsyCh Journal 3

© 2014 The Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Wiley Publishing Asia Pty Ltd