Negative target stimuli do not influence cross-modal auditory distraction

Abstract

The present study served to test whether emotion modulates auditory distraction in a serial-order reconstruction task. If auditory distraction results from an attentional trade-off between the targets and distractors, auditory distraction should decrease when attention is focused on targets with high negative arousal. Two experiments (with a total N of 284 participants) were conducted to test whether auditory distraction is influenced by target emotion. In Experiment 1 it was examined whether two benchmark effects of auditory distraction—the auditory-deviant effect and the changing-state effect—differ as a function of whether negative high-arousal targets or neutral low-arousal targets are used. Experiment 2 complements Experiment 1 by testing whether target emotion modulates the disruptive effects of reversed sentential speech and steady-state distractor sequences relative to a quiet control condition. Even though the serial order of negative high-arousal targets was better remembered than that of neutral low-arousal targets, demonstrating an emotional facilitation effect on serial-order reconstruction, auditory distraction was not modulated by target emotion. The results provide support of the automatic-capture account according to which auditory distraction, regardless of the specific type of auditory distractor sequence that has to be ignored, is a fundamentally stimulus-driven effect that is rooted in the automatic processing of the to-be-ignored auditory stream and remains unaffected by emotional-motivational factors.