Our attention is often captured by unexpected or unusual sounds. Such stimulus- driven control of attention can be adaptive, as potentially relevant events need to be quickly evaluated and acted upon. Attentional capture, however, comes with a cost: Ongoing tasks may be disrupted. In a series of seven experiments (n=773), we investigated the effects of task-irrelevant, rare, and relatively unexpected sounds (“surprise stimuli”) on probe detection in rapid auditory presentation (RAP) streams. Surprise stimuli caused “Surprise-induced Deafness” (SiD), a severe detection deficit that lasted for under one second within each trial and gradually habituated across several trials. SiD was sensitive to informational “surprise”, with larger deficits following stimuli that were infrequent or varied across trials. The effect also generalized: Natural sounds or constructed stimuli could disrupt detection of either spoken letters or simple tones. We also compared SiD to the auditory attentional blink (AAB), a similar paradigm in which goal-directed target processing disrupts probe detection. We found that the two deficits were weakly correlated. We conclude that SiD is a novel perceptual deficit that primarily reflects stimulus-driven attentional capture. It may involve other forms of attentional control as well, thereby reflecting multiple attentional influences on awareness.
Involuntary attentional capture by task-irrelevant objects that match the search template for category detection in natural scenes
