Watch Fabrice's talk at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society

The talk presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society (November, 2021) is noW available to watch on YouTube.

Reference:
Parmentier, F. B. R., & Gallego, L. (2021). Is Deviance Distraction Immune to the Prior Sequential Learning of Stimuli and Responses? Talk presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, 4-7 November.

Abstract:
Unexpected auditory stimuli presented in the context of an otherwise repeated standard sound capture participants’ attention away from a focal task and yield distraction. While making such sounds predictable reduces distraction, the effect of making target stimuli and responses predictable is unknown. Using a modified serial reaction time task, we installed the learning of a sequence of target stimuli before testing the impact of unexpected sounds on performance. In the learning phase, participants pressed response buttons corresponding to visual cues appearing in one of four spatial locations arranged horizontally. Unbeknownst to participants, the sequence of locations followed a pattern during several blocks before being replaced by a new pattern. The data provided solid evidence of sequence learning for the repeated sequence. In the auditory distraction phase, auditory distractors were presented immediately before each visual target. Unexpected sounds lengthened response times compared to the standard sound (novelty distraction), equally for learned and new sequences. We conclude that the anticipation of target stimuli and responses does not shield participants from deviance distraction.