The Mechanism Of Deviant Distraction In Involuntary Attention: An Improvement And Development Of Informational View Of Distraction

The unexpected occurrence of abrupt auditory stimuli or those deviating from theauditory homogenous background captures attention involuntarily. More significantly,novelty also results in measurable behavioral effects such as longer RTs and reduced responseaccuracy. This distraction effect is observed across different sensory channels, whetherdistractor and target information are both presented in the auditory modality, the visualmodality, or in different modalities, such as in the auditory-visual or tactile-visualcross-modal oddball tasks. Past studies posit, somewhat peremptorily, that novelty distractionresults from the novel’s low probability of occurrence and its corollary unpredictable nature.In recent years, more and more studies suggest that interference is a result of interaction ofstimulus-driven bottom-up processing and strategy-driven top-down processing. The role ofbottom-up processing has been widely recognized, and the role of top-down processing ismainly embodied in attention transferring and reorientation. The view of informational valuesummarizes the condition of deviant distraction completely and proposes the informativevalue between distractor and target which is our research based on.In study I and II, we improved the theory of informational value. At frist, we verified therole of "cognitive expectation" in study I and we distinguished the temporal information(target’s time of occurrence) and event information (the information provided by the soundthat a target is coming with certainty) in study II. The results suggested that target’sprobability of occurrence was a potential important variable. Combined with cognitive controlon deviant distraction we developed the theory of informational value in study III. Based onbehavioral results, we revealed the neural mechanism of the cognitive control on deviantdistraction using ERP. The results were as follows.In study I, we investigated the deviant effect and post-deviant effect. The resultsillustrated that different cognitive aspiration level could affect deviant distraction effect.Behavioral distraction also resulted from the violation of the cognitive system’s expectationbased on the learning of conditional probabilities and, to some extent, the unexpectedoccurrence of a perceptual changed from one sound to another.The theory of informational value emphasized the informational value between"irrelevant stimulus" and "irrelevant attribute" with target. In study II, we compared deviancedistraction from different types of information (event information, temporal information, orevent and temporal information) provided by auditory distractors about the targets. Theresults demonstrated there were the deviant effect and post-deviant effect in cross-modal andpure auditory oddball task. The results suggested that target’s probability of occurrence was apotential important variable.The theory of informational value confirmed the role of bottom-up processing.Neverthless, how this processing regulates deviant distraction is still controversial. In studyIII, our results demonstrated that deviant distraction would be increased when a larger conflictof processing resources between the distracter and target stimuli. Based on behavioral results, we investigated the neural mechanism of the cognitive control on deviant distraction usingERP in exp.9. Even when the deviant distraction increased in visual working memory loadcondition, the neural mechanism of the control was still consistent with SanMiguel et al.’sresearch. The results demonstrated that the neural mechanism had no different when theconflict between irrelevant information and relevant information was increased.Finally, our studies improved and developed the theory of informational value. Weconsidered that whenever there was a stronger conflict between distracter and target stimulifor processing resources, the working memory load would increase the deviant distraction incross-modal and pure auditory oddball task.