Novelty-P3: an index of involuntary orienting, but not distraction
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1
University of Barcelona, Spain
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2
Bangor University and North Wales Clinical School, United Kingdom
The occurrence of an unexpected sound in the environment captures attention involuntarily and generates an orienting response towards it, in order to analyse its potential relevance. Several lines of research have investigated the involuntary orienting response by means of auditory oddball paradigms. In these studies, a stable auditory context is generated by presenting repeating sounds following a specific pattern. Once the auditory context is established, this regularity is broken by the unexpected occurrence of a deviating sound. If the unexpected sound occurs during the performance of a task, the involuntary orienting of attention towards the sounds generally results in an impairment of task performance. The involuntary orienting of attention towards the deviating stimulus is accompanied by a well-defined pattern of electrophysiological responses that can be observed in the difference waves that result from subtracting the response generated by the repeating sound from that generated by the deviating one, comprising MMN/N1, novelty-P3 and RON. It is generally assumed that this components index, respectively, three main stages of the orienting response: 1) change detection, 2) orienting of attention towards the deviation and 3) reorientation of attention back to the main task after distraction. Since this response is generally accompanied by a distraction effect, particularly the Novelty-P3 has been often taken as an electrophysiological marker of distraction. Recently, however, we have described that novel sounds, presented in the same sequence, can result in facilitation rather than in distraction on a visual task. This result raises the issue of which electrophysiological markers must accompany the facilitation response. The present experiment served two main purposes: First, to investigate, by means of ERPs the nature and locus of the facilitation effect produced by novel sounds in specific task settings. To that aim, we compared electrophysiological responses generated by the visual stimulus after the presentation of standard (repeating) and novel (deviating) sounds. The precise timing of the ERP components allows identifying the specific phase of the processing of the visual stimulus that is facilitated. Second, the novely-P3 and RON components are commonly used as an electrophysiological index of distraction caused by unexpected auditory deviant or novel stimuli. Thus, we aimed at verifying whether these components are also elicited when novel sounds result in facilitation rather than distraction. Unexpected novel sounds presented during the performance of a delayed memory recognition task resulted in behavioural facilitation, elicited MMN/N1-enhacement, Novelty-P3 and RON and enhanced visual P300 to targets. Therefore, we suggest that the novelty-P3 and RON components indeed reflect the orienting of attention towards the deviating novel sound and subsequent reorientation to the task respectively, but that these responses however need not result in distraction in all situations. Thus, amplitude of novelty-P3 and RON should not be taken as measures of distractibility. Furthermore, the facilitation effect was mainly paralleled by an enhancement of the visual P300 component, indicating that the effects took place at a late stage of processing.
Conference:
10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience, Bodrum, Türkiye, 1 Sep - 5 Sep, 2008.
Presentation Type:
Poster Presentation
Topic:
Attention
Citation:
San Miguel
I,
Morgan
H,
Klein
C,
Linden
D and
Escera
C
(2008). Novelty-P3: an index of involuntary orienting, but not distraction.
Conference Abstract:
10th International Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience.
doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.09.2009.01.105
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Received:
03 Dec 2008;
Published Online:
03 Dec 2008.
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Correspondence:
Iria San Miguel, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain, righart@lrz.tu-muenchen.de