Salient sounds distort time perception and production.

ABSTRACT: The auditory world is often cacophonous, with some sounds capturing attention and distracting us from our goals. Despite the universality of this experience, many questions remain about how and why sound captures attention, how rapidly behavior is disrupted, and how long this interference lasts. Here, we use a novel measure of behavioral disruption to test predictions made by models of auditory salience. Models predict that goal-directed behavior is disrupted immediately after points in time that feature a high degree of spectrotemporal change. We find that behavioral disruption is precisely time-locked to the onset of distracting sound events: Participants who tap to a metronome temporarily increase their tapping speed 750 ms after the onset of distractors. Moreover, this response is grea

SUBMITTER: Symons A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10866776 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature