Fabrice B. R. Parmentier

The effect of age on involuntary capture of attention by irrelevant sounds: A test of the frontal hypothesis of aging

The aim of this study was to examine the effects of aging on the involuntary capture of attention by irrelevant sounds (distraction) and the use of these sounds as warning cues (alertness) in an oddball paradigm. We compared the performance of older and younger participants on a well-characterized auditory-visual distraction task. Based on the dissociations observed in aging between attentional processes sustained by the anterior and posterior attentional networks, our prediction was that distraction by irrelevant novel sounds would be stronger in older adults than in young adults while both groups would be equally able to use sound as an alert to prepare for upcoming stimuli. The results confirmed both predictions: there was a larger distraction effect in the older participants, but the alert effect was equivalent in both groups. These results give support to the frontal hypothesis of aging [Raz, N. (2000). Aging of the brain and its impact on cognitive performance: integration of structural and functional finding. In F.I.M. Craik & T.A. Salthouse (Eds.) Handbook of aging and cognition (pp. 1-90). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum; West, R. (1996). An application of prefrontal cortex function theory to cognitive aging. Psychological Bulletin, 120, 272-292].

Grouping of list items reflected in the timing of recall: implications for models of serial verbal memory

Three experiments examined the effect of temporal grouping on the timing of recall in verbal serial memory. Compared to an ungrouped condition, recall in a grouped condition produced a peak in latency between the groups (Experiment 1). However, the ratio of within- to between-group intervals at presentation was not reflected in recall (Experiment 2), contrary to the predictions of some oscillator models (Brown, Preece, & Hulme, 2000; Burgess & Hitch, 1999). In Experiment 3, grouped and ungrouped lists of different lengths were compared to assess a recent version of the ACT-R model applied to serial recall (Anderson, Bothell, Lebiere, & Matessa, 1998). Recall latencies showed a cost at group onset related to group size and a cost for all items of the first group associated with carriage of a second group. Results are discussed with reference to oscillator models, the ACT-R model, and augmented versions of it.

Transitional information in spatial serial memory: path characteristics affect recall performance.

This study examined the role of stimulus characteristics in a visuospatial order reconstruction task in which participants were required to recall the order of sequences of spatial locations. The complexity of the to-be-remembered sequences, as measured by path crossing, path length, and angles, was found to affect serial memory, in terms of both recall accuracy and response times. The results demonstrate that not all sequences are remembered equally and that spatial characteristics of the sequences constitute an important variable in the understanding of visuospatial serial memory. More important, the data suggest that spatial path represents transitional information and that, as is the case in verbal serial memory, transitional information is of critical importance in serial memory.

Behavioral distraction by auditory novelty is not only about novelty: The role of the distracter's informational value

Unexpected events often distract us. In the laboratory, novel auditory stimuli have been shown to capture attention away from a focal visual task and yield specific electrophysiological responses as well as a behavioral cost to performance. Distraction is thought to follow ineluctably from the sounds low probability of occurrence or, put more simply, its unexpected occurrence. Our study challenges this view with respect to behavioral distraction and argues that past research failed to identify the informational value of sound as a mediator of novelty distraction. We report an experiment showing that (1) behavioral novelty distraction is only observed when the sound announces the occurrence and timing of an upcoming visual target (as is the case in all past research); (2) that no such distraction is observed for deviant sounds conveying no such information; and that (3) deviant sounds can actually facilitate performance when these, but not the standards, convey information. We conclude that behavioral novelty distraction, as observed in oddball tasks, is observed in the presence of novel sounds but only when the cognitive system can take advantage of the auditory distracters to optimize performance.

The Involuntary Capture of Attention by Sound Novelty and Postnovelty Distraction in Young and Older Adults

The presentation of auditory oddball stimuli (novels) among otherwise repeated sounds (standards) triggers a well-identified chain of electrophysiological responses: The detection of acoustic change (mismatch negativity), the involuntary orientation of attention to (P3a) and its reorientation from the novel. Behaviorally, novels reduce performance in an unrelated visual task (novelty distraction). Past studies of the cross-modal capture of attention by acoustic novelty have typically discarded from their analysis the data from the standard trials immediately following a novel, despite some evidence in mono-modal oddball tasks of distraction extending beyond the presentation of deviants/novels (postnovelty distraction). The present study measured novelty and postnovelty distraction and examined the hypothesis that both types of distraction may be underpinned by common frontally-related processes by comparing young and older adults. Our data establish that novels delayed responses not only on the current trial and but also on the subsequent standard trial. Both of these effects increased with age. We argue that both types of distraction relate to the reconfiguration of task-sets and discuss this contention in relation to recent electrophysiological studies.

Is verbal–spatial binding in working memory impaired by a concurrent memory load?

Binding processes play a critical role in memory. We investigated whether the binding of (visually presented) verbal and spatial (locations) information involves general attentional resources, as stipulated in the revised working memory model, by comparing measures of binding in the presence and absence of a concurrent memory load. Using an adaptation of a probe recognition task contrasting performance between intact and recombined conditions, we found that the concurrent retention of a sequence of three pure tones eliminated verbal–spatial binding. The present study constitutes the first to directly measure the impact of a concurrent memory load on verbal–spatial binding and suggests that such binding may indeed recruit attentional resources, consistent with some recent findings in the visual–spatial binding literature.

The cognitive determinants of behavioral distraction by deviant auditory stimuli: a review

Numerous studies have demonstrated that rare and unexpected changes in an otherwise repetitive or structured sound sequence ineluctably break through selective attention and impact negatively on performance in an unrelated task. While the electrophysiological responses to unexpected sounds have been extensively studied, behavioral distraction has received relatively less attention until recently. In this paper, I review work examining the cognitive underpinnings of behavioral distraction by deviant sounds and highlight some of its key determinants. Evidence indicates that deviance distraction (1) derives from the time penalty associated with the involuntary orientation of attention to and away from the deviant sound and from resulting effects such as the reactivation of the relevant task set upon the presentation of the target stimulus; and (2) is mediated by a number of factors (some increasing distraction, such as aging or induced emotions; some decreasing it, such as a memory load or cognitive control). Contrary to the received view that deviants ineluctably elicit distraction, recent work demonstrates that it is contingent upon auditory distractors acting as unspecific warning signals in the service of goal-oriented behavior, and that deviants do not elicit distraction because they are rare but because they violate the cognitive system’s predictions (which can be manipulated through implicit rule learning or explicit cueing). Evidence is also presented indicating that the capture of attention by spoken deviant sounds is followed by an involuntary evaluation of their semantic properties, the outcome of which can be robust enough to linger in working memory and interfere with subsequent behavior. Finally, I review studies suggesting that behavioral deviance distraction is not the mere byproduct of the mismatch negativity, P3a and re-orientation negativity electrophysiological responses and highlight a number of outstanding questions for future research.

Plasticity of Attentional Functions in Older Adults after Non-Action Video Game Training: A Randomized Controlled Trial

A major goal of recent research in aging has been to examine cognitive plasticity in older adults and its capacity to counteract cognitive decline. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether older adults could benefit from brain training with video games in a cross-modal oddball task designed to assess distraction and alertness. Twenty-seven healthy older adults participated in the study (15 in the experimental group, 12 in the control group. The experimental group received 20 1-hr video game training sessions using a commercially available brain-training package (Lumosity) involving problem solving, mental calculation, working memory and attention tasks. The control group did not practice this package and, instead, attended meetings with the other members of the study several times along the course of the study. Both groups were evaluated before and after the intervention using a cross-modal oddball task measuring alertness and distraction. The results showed a significant reduction of distraction and an increase of alertness in the experimental group and no variation in the control group. These results suggest neurocognitive plasticity in the old human brain as training enhanced cognitive performance on attentional functions. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02007616

Directed forgetting in working memory: Age‐related differences

This study explored the effects of ageing on working memory by means of the directed forgetting procedure designed by Reed (1970). Memory for a letter trigram was compared in conditions where it was either presented alone (single‐item), or followed by a second trigram to be recalled (interference), or followed by a second trigram to be forgotten (directed forgetting). The results clearly indicated that elderly participants inhibited the no‐longer‐relevant information less efficiently (recall in the single‐item condition – recall in the directed forgetting condition), as predicted by the model of Hasher and Zacks (1988). However, the results also demonstrated that sensitivity to interference (recall in the single‐item condition – recall in the interference condition) increased in the condition in which no inhibition was directly required.

Functional characteristics of auditory temporal-spatial short-term memory: evidence from serial order errors.

The functional characteristics of auditory temporal-spatial short-term memory were explored in 8 experiments in which the to-be-remembered stimuli were sequences of bursts of white noise presented in spatial locations separated in azimuth. Primacy and recency effects were observed in all experiments. A 10-s delay impaired recall for primacy and middle list items but not recency. This effect was shown not to depend on the response modality or on the incidence of omissions or repetitions. Verbal and nonverbal secondary tasks did not affect memory for auditory spatial sounds. Temporal errors rather than spatial errors predominated, suggesting that participants were engaged in a process of maintaining order. This pattern of results may reflect characteristics that serial recall has in common with verbal and spatial recall, but some are unique to the representation of memory for temporal-spatial auditory events.