Distraction by deviant sounds during reading: An eye-movement study.

ABSTRACT: Oddball studies have shown that sounds unexpectedly deviating from an otherwise repeated sequence capture attention away from the task at hand. While such distraction is typically regarded as potentially important in everyday life, previous work has so far not examined how deviant sounds affect performance on more complex daily tasks. In this study, we developed a new method to examine whether deviant sounds can disrupt reading performance by recording participants' eye movements. Participants read single sentences in silence and while listening to task-irrelevant sounds. In the latter condition, a 50-ms sound was played contingent on the fixation of five target words in the sentence. On most occasions, the same tone was presented (standard sound), whereas on rare and unexpected occasions

SUBMITTER: Vasilev MR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6613176 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature