Cross‐modal distractors modulate oscillatory alpha power: the neural basis of impaired task performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Unexpected novel sounds capture one's attention, even when irrelevant to the task pursued (e.g., playing video game). This often comes at a cost to the task (e.g., slower responding). The neural basis for this behavioral distraction effect is not well understood and is subject of this study. Our approach was motivated by findings from cuing paradigms suggesting a link between modulations in oscillatory activity and voluntary attention shifts. The current study tested whether oscillatory activity is also modulated by a task-irrelevant auditory distractor, reflecting a neural signature of an involuntary shift of attention and accounting for the impaired task performance. We reanalyzed magnetoencephalographic data collected via an auditory-visual distraction paradigm in which a task-relevant visual stimulus was preceded by a task-irrelevant sound on each trial. In 87.5% this was a regular sound (Standard); in 12.5% this was a novel sound (Distractor). We compared nonphase locked oscillatory activity in a time window prior to the visual target as a function of the experimental manipulation (Distractor, Standard). We found low power in the pretarget time window for Distractors compared to Standards in the alpha and beta frequency bands. Importantly, individual alpha power correlated with response speed on a trial-by-trial basis for the Distractor only. Sources were localized to the occipital cortex, and also to the parietal and supratemporal cortices. These findings support our hypothesis that the distractor-related alpha power modulation indexes an involuntary shift of attention which accounts for the impaired task performance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".