Figure disembedding facility and reduced left visual field bias are linked to the social dimension of autistic traits.

In separate lines of work, facility in detail-focused local processing and reduced left visual field (LVF) bias have been associated with autism. Plausibly, local-processing facility and reduced LVF bias could reflect a common neurocognitive mechanism - most likely reduced right-hemisphere dominance in visual attention. To test this possibility, undergraduate students selected to differ systematically in social and non-social autistic traits completed tasks assessing local-processing facility (Leuven Embedded Figures) and LVF bias (greyscales task).

Unexpected sounds induce a rapid inhibition of eye-movement responses.

Unexpected sounds have been shown to trigger a global and transient inhibition of motor responses. Recent evidence suggests that eye movements may also be inhibited in a similar way, but it is not clear how quickly unexpected sounds can affect eye-movement responses. Additionally, little is known about whether they affect only voluntary saccades or also reflexive saccades.

Distraction by unexpected sounds: comparing response repetition and response switching.

Numerous studies using oddball tasks have shown that unexpected sounds presented in a predictable or repeated sequence (deviant vs. standard sounds) capture attention and negatively impact ongoing behavioral performance. Here, we examine an aspect of this effect that has gone relatively unnoticed: the impact of deviant sounds is stronger for response repetitions than for response switches.

Involuntary motor responses are elicited both by rare sounds and rare pitch changes.

Unpredictable deviations from an otherwise regular auditory sequence, as well as rare sounds following a period of silence, are detected automatically. Recent evidence suggests that the latter also elicit quick involuntary modulations of ongoing motor activity emerging as early as 100 ms following sound onset, which was attributed to supramodal processing. We explored such force modulations for both rare and deviant sounds.

Auditory context-dependent distraction by unexpected visual stimuli.

Research findings indicate that when a task-irrelevant stimulus feature deviates from an otherwise predictable pattern, participants performing a categorization task exhibit slower responses (deviance distraction). This deviance distraction effect reflects the violation of the sensory predictions generated by the cognitive system. In this study, we sought to examine for the first time whether these predictions can be incidentally modulated by the auditory environment.

Unexpected sounds inhibit the movement of the eyes during reading and letter scanning.

Novel sounds that unexpectedly deviate from a repetitive sound sequence are well known to cause distraction. Such unexpected sounds have also been shown to cause global motor inhibition, suggesting that they trigger a neurophysiological response aimed at stopping ongoing actions. Recently, evidence from eye movements has suggested that unexpected sounds also temporarily pause the movements of the eyes during reading, though it is unclear if this effect is due to inhibition of oculomotor planning or inhibition of language processes.

Distraction by deviant sounds is modulated by the environmental context.

Evidence shows that participants performing a continuous visual categorization task respond slower following the presentation of a task-irrelevant sound deviating from an otherwise repetitive or predictable auditory context (deviant sound among standard sounds). Here, for the first time, we explored the role of the environmental context (instrumentalized as a task-irrelevant background picture) in this effect. In two experiments, participants categorized left/right arrows while ignoring irrelevant sounds and background pictures of forest and city scenes.

Distraction by violation of sensory predictions: Functional distinction between deviant sounds and unexpected silences.

It has been established that participants performing a continuous categorization task respond significantly slower following the presentation of unexpected, task-irrelevant, auditory stimuli, compared to a repetitive (standard) sound. Evidence indicates that such distraction emerges because of the violation of sensory predictions. This has typically been studied by measuring the impact of replacing the repeated sound by a different sound on rare and unpredictable trials.

Busy and confused? High risk of missed alerts in the cockpit: An electrophysiological study.

The ability to react to unexpected auditory stimuli is critical in complex settings such as aircraft cockpits or air traffic control towers, characterized by high mental load and highly complex auditory environments (i.e., many different auditory alerts).

Aging Increases Cross-Modal Distraction by Unexpected Sounds: Controlling for Response Speed.

It is well-established that task-irrelevant sounds deviating from an otherwise predictable auditory sequence capture attention and disrupt ongoing performance by delaying responses in the ongoing task. In visual tasks, larger distraction by unexpected sounds (deviance distraction) has been reported in older than in young adults. However, past studies based this conclusion on the comparisons of absolute response times (RT) and did not control for the general slowing typically observed in older adults.

Assessing the Impact of Multi-Morbidity and Related Constructs on Patient Reported Safety in Primary Care: Generalized Structural Equation Modelling of Observational Data.

We aimed to examine the complex relationships between patient safety processes and outcomes and multimorbidity using a comprehensive set of constructs: multimorbidity, polypharmacy, discordant comorbidity (diseases not sharing either pathogenesis nor management), morbidity burden and patient complexity. We used cross-sectional data from 4782 patients in 69 primary care centres in Spain. We constructed generalized structural equation models to examine the associations between multimorbidity constructs and patient-reported patient safety (PREOS-PC questionnaire).

Is deviance distraction immune to the prior sequential learning of stimuli and responses?

Past studies show that novel, task-irrelevant auditory stimuli, presented in the context of an otherwise repeated standard sound, capture participants' attention away from a focal task, resulting in behavioral distraction. While evidence has shown that making novel sounds predictable reduces or eliminates distraction, it remains unknown whether predictable target stimuli can also shield participants from novelty distraction. Using a serial reaction time task, we installed the learning of a sequence of target stimuli before testing the impact of novel sounds on performance for this sequence compared with a new one.

Distraction by deviant sounds: disgusting and neutral words capture attention to the same extent.

Several studies have argued that words evoking negative emotions, such as disgust, grab attention more than neutral words, and leave traces in memory that are more persistent. However, these conclusions are typically based on tasks requiring participants to process the semantic content of these words in a voluntarily manner. We sought to compare the involuntary attention grabbing power of disgusting and neutral words using them as rare and unexpected auditory distractors in a cross-modal oddball task, and then probing the participants' memory for these stimuli in a surprise recognition task.

Mindfulness and Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety in the General Population: The Mediating Roles of Worry, Rumination, Reappraisal and Suppression.

The present study examined the effects of mindfulness on depression and anxiety, both direct and indirect through the mediation of four mechanisms of emotional regulation: worry, rumination, reappraisal and suppression. Path analysis was applied to data collected from an international and non-clinical sample of 1151 adults, including both meditators and non-meditators, who completed an online questionnaire battery. Our results show that mindfulness are related to lower levels of depression and anxiety both directly and indirectly.

Surprise as an explanation to auditory novelty distraction and post-error slowing.

Performance in sustained attention tasks is known to be slowed by the occurrence of unexpected task-irrelevant distractors (novelty distraction) and the detection of errors (posterror slowing), 2 well-established phenomena studied separately and regarded as reflecting distinct underpinning mechanisms. We measured novelty distraction and posterror slowing in an auditory-visual oddball task to test the hypothesis that they both involve an orienting response. Our results confirm that the 2 effects exhibit a positive interaction.

Food words distract the hungry: Evidence of involuntary semantic processing of task-irrelevant but biologically-relevant unexpected auditory words.

Rare changes in a stream of otherwise repeated task-irrelevant sounds break through selective attention and disrupt performance in an unrelated visual task by triggering shifts of attention to and from the deviant sound (deviance distraction). Evidence indicates that the involuntary orientation of attention to unexpected sounds is followed by their semantic processing. However, past demonstrations relied on tasks in which the meaning of the deviant sounds overlapped with features of the primary task.

The role of age, working memory, and response inhibition in deviance distraction: A cross-sectional study.

Sounds deviating from an otherwise repeated or structured sequence capture attention and affect performance in an ongoing visual task negatively, testament to the balance between selective attention and change detection. Although deviance distraction has been the object of much research, its modulation across the life span has been more scarcely addressed. Recent findings suggest possible connections with working memory and response inhibition.

Deviant sounds yield distraction irrespective of the sounds' informational value.

Oddball studies show that rare and unexpected changes in an otherwise repetitive or structured sequence of task-irrelevant sounds (deviant sounds among standard sounds) ineluctably break through attentional filters and yield longer response times in an ongoing task. Although this deviance distraction effect has generally been thought of as an involuntary and adaptive phenomenon, recent studies questioned this view by reporting that deviance distraction is observed when sounds predict the occurrence of a target stimulus (informative sounds) but that it disappears when sounds do not convey this information (uninformative sounds). Here, I challenge this conclusion and suggest that the apparent absence of deviance distraction with uninformative sounds results in fact from 2 opposite effects: deviance distraction when the previous trial involved a target and required responding, and a speeding up of responses by deviant sound following trials involving no target and requiring the withholding of responses.

Disentangling the effects of word frequency and contextual diversity on serial recall performance.

Research shows that contextual diversity (CD; the number of different contexts in which a word appears within a corpus) constitutes a better predictor of reading performance than word frequency (WF), that it mediates the access to lexical representations, and that controlling for contextual CD abolishes the effect of WF in lexical decision tasks. Despite the theoretical relevance of these findings for the study of serial memory, it is not known how CD might affect serial recall performance. We report the first independent manipulation of CD and WF in a serial recall task.

Happiness increases distraction by auditory deviant stimuli.

Rare and unexpected changes (deviants) in an otherwise repeated stream of task-irrelevant auditory distractors (standards) capture attention and impair behavioural performance in an ongoing visual task. Recent evidence indicates that this effect is increased by sadness in a task involving neutral stimuli. We tested the hypothesis that such effect may not be limited to negative emotions but reflect a general depletion of attentional resources by examining whether a positive emotion (happiness) would increase deviance distraction too.

When aging does not increase distraction: Evidence from pure auditory and visual oddball tasks.

Past research indicates that age increases deviance distraction in cross-modal oddball tasks, but results are few and less conclusive in purely auditory oddball tasks, with 3 studies not reporting age-related increase in deviance distraction against 1 that did (d = 1.04). This study aimed to (a) examine the effect of age on deviance distraction using the largest sample size to date to ensure adequate statistical power and (b) extend the study of same-modality deviance distraction to the visual modality.

Reorienting the mind: The impact of novel sounds on go/no-go performance.

The present study explores the link between attentional reorienting and response inhibition. Recent behavioral and neuroscience work indicates that both might rely on similar cognitive and neural mechanisms. We tested 2 popular accounts of the overlap: The "circuit breaker" account, which assumes that unexpected events produce global suppression of motor output, and the "stimulus detection" account, which assumes that attention is reoriented to unexpected events.

Can auditory deviant stimuli temporarily suspend cognitive processing? Evidence from patients with anxiety.

While anxiety is typically thought to increase distractibility, this notion mostly derives from studies using emotionally loaded distractors presented in the same modality as the target stimuli and tasks involving crosstalk interference. We examined whether pathological anxiety might also increase distractibility for emotionally neutral irrelevant sounds presented prior to target stimuli in a task where these stimuli do not compete for selection. Patients with anxiety and control participants categorized visual digits preceded by task-irrelevant sounds that changed on rare trials (auditory deviance).

The semantic aftermath of distraction by deviant sounds: Crosstalk interference is mediated by the predictability of semantic congruency.

Rare changes in a stream of otherwise repeated task-irrelevant sounds break through selective attention and disrupt performance in an unrelated visual task. This deviance distraction effect emerges because deviant sounds violate the cognitive system's predictions. In this study we sought to examine whether predictability also mediate the so-called semantic effect whereby behavioral performance suffers from the clash between the involuntary semantic evaluation of irrelevant sounds and the voluntary processing of visual targets (e.

Contrasting effects of changing rhythm and content on auditory distraction in immediate memory.

Across 5 experiments, the temporal regularity and content of an irrelevant speech stream were varied and their effects on a serial recall task examined. Variations of the content, but not the rhythm, of the irrelevant speech stimuli reliably disrupted serial recall performance in all experiments. Bayesian analyses supported the null hypothesis over the hypothesis that irregular rhythms would disrupt memory to a greater extent than regular rhythms.