Our recent work on the inhibition of eye movements by auditory distraction has just been accepted for publication in Psychophysiology. Part of our results. Aggregate sound novelty distraction effect on the Sacadic Reaction Time (SRT) in anti- and pro-saccade conditions. Relative to a control, standard, condition, the unexpected sounds significantly delay saccades in both tasks but more so in the anti-saccade task. (Figure by Martin Vasilev) Abstract: Unexpected sounds have been shown to trigger a global and transient inhibition of motor responses. Recent evidence suggests that the movement of the eyes may also be inhibited in a similar way, but it is not clear how quickly unexpected sounds can affect eye-movement responses. Additionally, little is known about whether they affect only voluntary saccades or also reflexive saccades. In this study, participants performed a pro-saccade and an anti-saccade task while the timing of sounds relative to stimulus onset was manipulated. Pro-saccades are generally reflexive and stimulus-driven, whereas anti-saccades require the generation of a voluntary saccade in the opposite direction of a peripheral stimulus. Unexpected novel sounds inhibited the execution of both pro- and anti-saccades compared to standard sounds, but the inhibition was stronger for anti-saccades. The timeline of the novelty distraction effect was relatively stable– it was observed from 150 ms before target onset to 25ms after target onset. Interestingly, unexpected sounds also reduced anti-saccade task errors, indicating that they aided inhibitory control. Overall, these results suggest that unexpected sounds yield a global and rapid inhibition of eye-movement responses. This inhibition also helps suppress reflexive eye-movement responses in favour of more voluntarily-generated ones.Reference: Vasilev, M. R., Ozkan, Z. G., Kirkby, J. A., Nuthmann, A., & Parmentier, F. B. R. (in press). Unexpected sounds induce a rapid inhibition of eye-movement responses. Psychophysiology. This study is part of the ongoing collaboration between Fabrice Parmentier, Martin Vasilev (UCL, UK) and Julie Kirkby (University of Bournemouth, UK) and is supported by Project PID2020-114117GB-I00 funded by MICIU/AEI /10.13039/501100011033.  

The first results fron Elena García-López’s PhD research have just been published. The study investigated the modulation of motor responses by auditory distractors. Reference: García-López, E., & Parmentier, F. B. R. (2024). Distraction by unexpected sounds: comparing response repetition and response switching. Frontiers in Psychology, 15:1451008. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1451008 Abstract: Numerous studies using oddball tasks have shown that unexpected sounds presented in a predictable or repeated sequence (deviant vs standard sounds) capture attention and negatively impact ongoing behavioral performance. Here, we examine an aspect of this effect that has gone relatively unnoticed: the impact of deviant sounds is stronger for response repetitions than for response switches. Our approach was two-fold. First, we carried out a simulation to estimate the likelihood that stimuli sequences used in past work may not have used balanced proportions of response repetition and switch trials. More specifically, we sought to determine whether the larger distraction effect for response repetitions may have reflected a rarer, and thereby more surprising, occurrence of such trials. To do so, we simulated 10,000 stimuli sets for a 2-AFC task with a proportion of deviant trial of .1 or .16. Second, we carried out a 2-AFC oddball task in which participants judged the duration of a tone (short vs long). We carefully controlled the sequence of stimuli to ensure to balance the proportions of response repetitions and response switches across the standard and deviant conditions. The results of the stimuli simulation showed that, contrary to our concerns, response switches were more likely than response repetitions when left uncontrolled for. This suggests that the larger distraction found for response repetition in past work may in fact have been underestimated. In the tone duration judgment task, the results showed a large impact of the response type on distraction as measured by response times: Deviants sounds significantly delayed response repetitions but notably accelerated switches. These findings suggest that deviant sound hinder response repetition and encourage or bias the cognitive system towards a change of responses. We discuss these findings in relation to the adaptive nature of the involuntary detection of unexpected stimuli and in relation to the notion of partial repetition costs. We argue that results are in line with the binding account as well as with the signaling theory.  We conducted an Ex-Gaussien analysis of response times Unexpected sounds delayed repeated responses but speeded up responses switches (mu). Longer responses tended to show lower variability (sigma). Finally, the slope of the RT distribution (tau) proved to be sensitive to auditory distraction byt independently of the type if response (switch vs repetition).

A multidisciplinary effort by Pilar Andrés and colleagues from various centers in Palma and in Madrid publishes evidence that liver fibrosis might be a valid biomarker of dementia and cognitive decline.Reference :Pujol, A., Sanchis, P., Tamayo, M. I., Godoy, S., Calvó, P., Olmos, A., Andrés, P., Speranskaya, A., Espino, A., Estremera, A., Rigo, E., Amengual, G. J., Rodríguez, M., Ribes, J. L., Gomila, I., Grases, F., González-Freire, M., & Masmiquel, L. (2024). Metabolic-Associated Fatty Liver Disease and Cognitive Performance in Type 2 Diabetes: Basal Data from the Phytate, Neurodegeneration and Diabetes (PHYND) Study. Biomedicines, 12(9), 1993. https://doi.org/10.3390/BIOMEDICINES12091993Abstract: The effect of liver fibrosis on mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia risk in type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients is unclear. Therefore, we performed a prospective cross-sectional study on 219 patients with T2DM and older than 60 years to evaluate the association between liver fibrosis, liver steatosis, and cognitive impairment. The Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) was used to screen for MCI or dementia. Liver fibrosis was estimated using the non-invasive Fibrosis-4 (FIB-4) score, and liver steatosis was assessed with the hepatic steatosis index. The mean age was 71 ± 6 years, 47% were women and according to MoCA cut-off values, 53.88% had MCI and 16.43% had dementia. A moderate or high risk of advanced fibrosis was significantly higher in patients with MCI or dementia compared to those with normal cognition (p < 0.001). After adjusting for confounders, a FIB-4 score greater than 1.54 was associated with MCI or dementia (p = 0.039). Multivariate analysis identified age over 70.5 years, antiplatelet medication use, and a FIB-4 score above 1.54 as the most relevant risk factors. Liver fibrosis, but not liver steatosis, is associated with MCI or dementia in older T2DM patients, suggesting that FIB-4 score might be a simple biomarker for the detection of cognitive impairment.

Our latest research on the impact of auditory distractors on motor activity is out!Reference: Sabu, S., Parmentier, F. B. R., & Horváth, J. (2024). Involuntary motor responses are elicited both by rare sounds and rare pitch changes. Scientific Reports 2024 14:1, 14(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-70776-xAbstract: Unpredictable deviations from an otherwise regular auditory sequence, as well as rare sounds following a period of silence, are detected automatically. Recent evidence suggests that the latter also elicit quick involuntary modulations of ongoing motor activity emerging as early as 100 ms following sound onset, which was attributed to supramodal processing. We explored such force modulations for both rare and deviant sounds. Participants (N=29) pinched a force sensitive device and maintained a force of 1-2 N for periods of 1 min. Task-irrelevant tones were presented under two conditions. In the Rare condition, 4000 Hz tones were presented every 8-to-16 s. In the Roving condition, 4000 Hz and 2996 Hz tones were presented at rate of 1 sec, with infrequent (p=1/12) frequency changes. In the Rare condition, transient force modulations were observed with a significant increase at ~234 ms, and a decrease at ~350 ms. In the Roving condition with low frequency deviant tones, an increase in force was observed at ~277 ms followed by a decrease at ~413 ms. No significant modulations were observed during perception of high frequency deviants. These results suggest that both rare silence-breaking sounds and low-pitched deviants evoke automatic fluctuations of motor responses, which opens up the possibility that these force modulations are triggered by stimulus-specific change-detection processes.

A new study carried out in collaboration with our partners at the Unievrsity of Bournemouth (UK) shows that the presentation of unexpected sounds disrupt eye movements through their transient inhibition. This work is part of Fabrice Parmentier’s current nationally-funded project and follows up on the solid collaboration established with Prof. Julie Kirkby and Dr. Martin Vasilev. Reference: Vasilev, M. R., Lowmann, M., Bills, K., Parmentier, F. B. R., & Kirkby, J. A. (2023). Unexpected sounds inhibit the movement of the eyes during reading and letter scanning. Psychophysiology, 023;00:e14389. doi: 10.1111/psyp.14389.Abstract: Novel sounds that unexpectedly deviate from a repetitive sound sequence are well known to cause distraction. Such unexpected sounds have also been shown to cause global motor inhibition, suggesting that they trigger a neurophysiological response aimed at stopping ongoing actions. Recently, evidence from eye movements has suggested that unexpected sounds also temporarily pause the movements of the eyes during reading, though it is unclear if this effect is due to inhibition of oculomotor planning or inhibition of language processes. Here, we sought to distinguish between these two possibilities by comparing a natural reading task to a letter scanning task that involves similar oculomotor demands to reading, but no higher level lexical processing. Participants either read sentences for comprehension or scanned letter strings of these sentences for the letter ‘o’ in three auditory conditions: silence, standard, and novel sounds. The results showed that novel sounds were equally distracting in both tasks, suggesting that they generally inhibit ongoing oculomotor processes independent of lexical processing. These results suggest that novel sounds may have a global suppressive effect on eye-movement control

Antonia’s Twitter thread explaining her doctoral thesis will represent the University of the Balearic Islands in the national competition. Antònua Siquier Perelló Congratulations Anònia!PhD student Antònia Siquier Perelló, supervised by Prof. Pilar Andrés, is the winner of the local phase of the #HiloTesis2023 competition, a competition in which participants must disseminate their doctoral thesis in a thread of, at most, 20 tweets, taking into account the limitations and possibilities offered by the social network Twitter. The series of messages about her doctoral thesis has focused on a new approach to understanding Parkinson’s disease through an innovative statistical method called the Item Specific Deficit Approach. This method quantifies the cognitive deficits of patients in an episodic memory test and analyzes their sensitivity.Antònia Siquier Perelló’s doctoral thesis is part of the research activity of our research group (Neurocog) and could be clinically relevant. The study implies that there is also neurodegeneration in the hippocampal structures of patients with Parkinson’s disease. This method could also contribute to learning more about the cognitive relationship between neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Antonia’s doctoral publication so far:Siquier, A., & Andrés, P. (in press). Facial emotion recognition in Parkinson’s disease: the role of executive and affective domains. Neuropsychology.Siquier, A., & Andrés, P. (2022). Face name matching and memory complaints in Parkinson’s disease. Frontiers in Psychology, 13:1051488. doi: 0.3389/fpsyg.2022.1051488Siquier, A., & Andrés, P. (2021). Episodic memory impairment in Parkinson’s disease: Disentangling the role of encoding and retrieval. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 27(3), 261-269. doi: 10.1017/S1355617720000909Siquier A, Andrés P. (2021, Jan 15). Cognitive and Behavioral Inhibition Deficits in Parkinson’s Disease: The Hayling Test as a Reliable Marker. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscence. doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2020.621603. PMID: 33519424; PMCID: PMC7843521.

Fabrice Parmentier has been invited to present part of the upcoming workshop organized by the University Utrecht. the workshop, entitled “An introduction to experiment building with OpenSesame” will introduce research students to the use of Open Sesame and its OSWeb component to run psychology and socal science experiments in the lab and online. the workshop will take place on May 24-26.

Our latest study, in press in Psychophysiology, was led by Annekathrin Weise (Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, Austria, and Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany) and reports magnetoencephalographic and behaviral data indicating that the distraction yielded by unexpected sounds involves a shift of spatial attention. Topoplot of the alpha power distribution in the 0.2 – 0.6 s time window following deviant onset. Stars indicate channels on which there was a prominent statistical effect. Reference: Weise, A., Hartmann, T., Parmentier, F. B. R., Weisz, N., & Ruhnau, P. (2023). Involuntary shifts of spatial attention contribute to behavioral crossmodal distraction: Evidence from oscillatory alpha power and reaction time data. Psychophysiology, 00:e14353. http://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.14353Abstract: Imagine you are focusing on the traffic on a busy street to ride a bike safely when suddenly you hear the siren of an ambulance. This unexpected sound involuntarily captures your attention and interferes with ongoing performance. We test whether this type of behavioral distraction involves a spatial shift of attention. We measured behavioral distraction and magnetoencephalographic alpha power during a crossmodal paradigm that combined an exogenous cueing task and a distraction task. On each trial, a task-irrelevant sound preceded a visual target (left or right). The sound was usually the same animal sound (i.e., standard sound). Rarely, it was replaced by an unexpected environmental sound (i.e., deviant sound). Fifty percent of the deviants occurred on the same side as the target, and 50% occurred on the opposite side. Participants responded to the location of the target. As expected, responses were slower to targets that followed a deviant compared to a standard, reflecting behavioral distraction. Crucially, this distraction was mitigated by the spatial relationship between the targets and the deviants: responses were faster when targets followed deviants on the same versus different side, indexing a spatial shift of attention. This was further corroborated by a posterior alpha power modulation that was higher in the hemisphere ipsilateral (vs. contralateral) to the location of the attention-capturing deviant. We suggest that this alpha power lateralization reflects a spatial attention bias. Overall, our data support the contention that spatial shifts of attention contribute to behavioral deviant distraction.

Our new study, published in Nature Scientific Reports, provides the first demonstration of the modulation of deviance distraction by the environmental context. This study was conducted together with our collaborators at the University of Vic (Spain), the University of Bologna (Italy) and at the University of Western Australia. Reference: Parmentier, F. B. R., Gallego, L., Micucci, A., Leiva, A., Andrés, P., & Maybery, M. T. (2022). Distraction by deviant sounds is modulated by the environmental context. Nature Scientific Reports, 12, 21447. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-25500-yAbstract: Evidence shows that participants performing a continuous visual categorization task respond slower following the presentation of a task-irrelevant sound deviating from an otherwise repetitive or predictable auditory context (deviant sound among standard sounds). Here, for the first time, we explored the role of the environmental context (instrumentalized as a task-irrelevant background picture) in this effect. In two experiments, participants categorized left/right arrows while ignoring irrelevant sounds and background pictures of forest and city scenes. While equiprobable across the task, sounds A and B were presented with probabilities of .882 and .118 in the forest context, respectively, and with the reversed probabilities in the city context. Hence, neither sound constituted a deviant sound at task-level, but each did within a specific context. In Experiment 1, where each environmental context (forest and city scene) consisted of a single picture each, participants were significantly slower in the visual task following the presentation of the sound that was unexpected within the current context (context-dependent distraction). Further analysis showed that the cognitive system reset its sensory predictions even for the first trial of a change in environmental context. In Experiment 2, the two contexts (forest and city) were implemented using sets of 19 pictures each, with the background picture changing on every trial. Here too, context-dependent deviance distraction was observed. However, participants took a trial to fully reset their sensory predictions upon a change in context. We conclude that irrelevant sounds are incidentally processed in association with the environmental context (even though these stimuli belong to different sensory modalities) and that sensory predictions are context-dependent. 

A new study carried out in collaboration with by scientists at France’s Institute of Aeronautics and Space (ISAE-SUPAERO) and the University of Toulouse, shows that pilots are at significant risk of missing system alerts when undergoing high mental load and high auditory load. The study used a simulated cockpit task and registered behavioral and electrophysiological responses to variations in mental and perceptual loads. The combined effects of these two factors increased the proportion of missed alerts to an alarming 68%.Reference: Causse, M., Parmentier, F. B. R., Mouratile, D., Thibaut, D., Kisselenko, M., & Fabre, E. (in press). Busy and confused? High risk of missed alerts in the cockpit: an electrophysiological study. Brain Research. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2022.148035Highlights:Efficient perception of auditory alarms is essential in safety-critical contexts.Miss rate drastically increased with high mental and auditory loads.P3b amplitude indexed mental and auditory loads variations.P3b amplitude was anti-correlated with individual alarm miss rate.Auditory alarm efficiency could be assessed with P3b measures.Abstract: The ability to react to unexpected auditory stimuli is critical in complex settings such as aircraft cockpits or air traffic control towers, characterized by high mental load and highly complex auditory environments (i.e., many different auditory alerts). Evidence shows that both factors can negatively impact auditory attention and prevent appropriate reactions. In the present study, 60 participants performed a simulated aviation task varying in terms of mental load (no, low, high) concurrently to a tone detection paradigm in which the complexity of the auditory environment (i.e., auditory load) was manipulated (1, 2 or 3 different tones). We measured both detection performance (miss, false alarm, d’) and brain activity (event-related potentials) associated with the target tone. Our results showed that both mental and auditory loads affected target tone detection performance. Importantly, their combined effects had a large impact on the percentage of missed target tones. While, in the no mental load condition, miss rate was very low with 1 (0.53%) and 2 tones (1.11%), it increased drastically with 3 tones (24.44%), and this effect was accentuated as mental load increased, yielding to the higher miss rate in the 3-tone paradigm under high mental load conditions (68.64%). Increased mental and auditory loads and miss rates were associated with disrupted brain responses to the target tone, as shown by a reduced P3b amplitude. In sum, our results highlight the importance of balancing mental and auditory loads to maintain efficient reactions to alarms in complex working environment.

Congratulations to Antonia and Pilar for their latest publication on facial emotional recognition in patients with Parkinson’s disease. the study will be published in Neuropsychology.The study compared patients with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and control participants in a task measuring the ability to recognize emotions from facial expressions. The results suggests that patients with PD present with a relative deficit in the recognition of emotions from facial expressions and that this deficit is related to an alteration of inhibitory functions. Reference: Siquier, A., & Andrés, P. (2022).  Facial emotion recognition in Parkinson’s disease: the role of executive and affective domains. Neuropsychology, in press.Abstract: Objective. The ability to recognize emotions from facial expression (FER) may be impaired in Parkinson’s disease (PD). We aimed to explore FER in PD patients by using a dynamic presentation of emotions across different intensities and to examine the extent to which executive and affective alterations contributed to FER deficits. Methods. Fifteen PD patients and 15 healthy controls were assessed on the Emotion Recognition Task (ERT). FER performance was tested for correlations and regression analyses with affective and neuropsychological tests to identify and quantify which factors best predicted ERT accuracy. Results . PD patients showed poorer performance on the ERT, specifically on angry expressions, but they benefited from increased intensity as much as controls did. Differences were also found for apathy, depression and executive tests, especially in the inhibition domain. Importantly, differences between groups on the ERT disappeared when controlling for inhibition and the affective symptoms. A significant effect of inhibition dysfunction was also observed on the ERT performance. Conclusions . Our findings demonstrate the presence of emotion recognition deficits of morphed facial expressions in patients with PD. Moreover, they suggest that inhibition dysfunctions may act as an important factor negatively influencing FER. The present study highlights the complex nature of emotion processing and its relation with emotional-affective  

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.

After many years programming experiments in E-Prime, we are starting to develop tasks using Open Sesame and its browser-oriented version OSWeb.E-Prime is a great tool and has been Fabrice Parmentier’s go-to experiment programming software for several years. It will most likely remain a feature of the Cognitive Psychology Lab, but it is expected that Open Sesame, a free and open program, will progressively become our main software for experimental studies (online and lab-based) in the future. Fabrice began exploring Open Sesame and its suitability for online experiments back in March 2021, leading him to become increasingly active in Open Sesame’s official forum site, helping other users to solve their task programming problems. This was noticed by Open Sesame’s creator and administrator of the forum, Prof. Sebastiaan Mathôt (University of Groningen, Netherlands), who has just invited Fabrice to join the team of moderators.Open Sesame-s reference:Mathôt, S., Schreij, D., & Theeuwes, J. (2012). OpenSesame: An open-source, graphical experiment builder for the social sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 44(2), 314-324. doi:10.3758/s13428-011-0168-7

JATOS ready for duty!Our group now counts with its own server and the JATOS service capable of running online studies programmed in jsPsych, lab.js, OSWeb/OpenSesame, PsyToolkit or any HTML/Javascript/CSS code. This service supports experiments on mobile devices, desktops and lab computers that run a browser.Fabrice Parmentier is managing JATOS for the group.

The research project, approved for funding by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (State Research Agency), will study auditory distraction. The project will be led by Fabrice Parmentier with the participation and support of a number of distinguished collaborators: János Horváth (Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Budapest, Hungary), Martin Vasilev and Julie Kirkby (Bournemouth University, UK), and Alicia Leiva (University of the Balearic Islands).The project, entitled “Extending our knowledge of distraction by unexpected sounds” will officially start in September 2021 and run for 4 years. The original work plan includes 22 empirical experiments that will investigate several aspects of auditory distraction, ranging from fundamental cognitive mechanisms to contextual variables and motoric aspects. The project was highly rated by 4 expert reviewers and received average scores of 93.64% for quality and feasibility, 92.5% for the project leader ‘s and collaborators’ track record, and 91.97% for expected impact. The overall project score is 93/100.The project is to be funded to the tune of 145,200 Euros and will include, in addition, one PhD studentship (estimated value of about 91,000).

Dr Alicia Leiva Our latest paper on aging and deviance distraction has been accepted for publication in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience and WILL come out shortly.This study by Leiva, Andrés and Parmentier uses Bayesian statistics and Bayesian estimation methods to revisit the results of five past studies and shows that aging increases distraction by unexpected sounds in cross-modal but not in uni-modal oddball tasks, even when controlling for age-related variations in baseline response speed. Bayesian estimation provides credible estimate of the size of the aging effect, showing that this distraction is about twice as large in older than in young adults. Proportional Measure of Distraction (PMD) for response times (RTs). Comparison of young and older adults in cross-modal oddball tasks. Relative to standard sounds, unexpected sounds increase RTs by 6.8% in older adults, against 2.9% in young adults. Reference: Leiva, A., Andrés, P., & Parmentier, F. B. R. (2021) Aging Increases Cross-Modal Distraction by Unexpected Sounds: Controlling for Response Speed. Front. Aging Neurosci. 13:733388. doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2021.733388Abstract: It is well established that task-irrelevant sounds deviating from an otherwise predictable auditory sequence capture attention and disrupt ongoing performance by delaying responses in the ongoing task. In visual tasks, larger distraction by unexpected sounds (deviance distraction) has been reported in older than in young adults. However, past studies based this conclusion on the comparisons of absolute response times and did not control for the general slowing typically observed in older adults. Hence, it remains unclear whether this difference in deviance distraction between the two age groups reflects a genuine effect of aging or a proportional effect of similar size in both groups. We addressed this issue by using a proportional measure of distraction to reanalyze the data from four past studies and used Bayesian estimation to generate credible estimates of the age-related difference in deviance distraction and its effect size. The results were unambiguous: older adults exhibited greater deviance distraction than young adults when controlling for baseline response speed (in each individual study and in the combined data set). Bayesian estimation revealed a proportional lengthening of response times by unexpected sounds that was about twice as large in older than in young adults (corresponding to a large statistical effect size). A similar analysis was carried out on the proportion of correct responses and produced converging results. Finally, an additional Bayesian analysis comparing data from cross-modal and uni-modal studies confirmed the selective effect of aging on distraction in the first and not the second. Overall, our study shows that older adults performing a visual categorization task do exhibit greater distraction by unexpected sounds than young adults and that this effect is not explicable by age-related general slowing.

Congratulations to Laura Gallego for obtaining the “matrícula de honor” (the top mark reserved for the very best performance) for her undergraduate dissertation Laura Gallego A panel of three academics awarded a mark of 9.7/10 to Laura for a dissertation focused on the role of visual context in auditory distraction. The dissertation is entitled “¿Puede el contexto visual modular la distracción auditiva? (“Can the visual context modulate auditory distraction?”). The mark was awarded on the basis of her written dissertation and an excellent oral presentation. The dissertation reports the results of a solid empirical experiment in which participants categorized visual targets while ignoring irrelevant sounds and background pictures. The results of this original piece of work unambiguously demonstrate that the cognitive system computes auditory sensory predictions based on probabilistic relationship between task-irrelevant sounds and visual background. Put simply, the human brain quickly learns to predict sounds based on the context in which they are experienced, making sound more or less distracting depending on the extent to which they are surprising in a given context. The work, supervised by Fabrice Parmentier, builds upon the literature on deviance distraction and opens new avenues for research in this field. We expect to complement and write up this work for publication in the near future.Laura has now completed her degree in psychology, which she did with great success and – an unprecedented event among our students – with a publication in one of the very best journals in experimental psychology! (more information here). Congratulations, Laura!

A recent transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) study in which participated Alicia Leiva with colleagues from the University of Granada and the University of Santiago de Compostela has just been accepted for publication in Cortex.The study reviews the role of activity in cortical areas underpinning inhibitory control and report the results of a new experiment seeking to examine the role of these areas in the expression of implicitly acquired sequences.Reference: Prutean, N., Martín-Arévalo, E., Leiva, A., Jiménez, L., Vallesi, A., & Lupiáñez, J. (in press). The causal role of inhibitory control on the acquisition and expression of implicit learning: state of the art. Cortex.Abstract: Implicit learning refers to the incidental acquisition and expression of knowledge that is not accompanied by full awareness of its contents. Implicit sequence learning (ISL) represents one of the most useful paradigms to investigate these processes. In this paradigm, participants are usually instructed to respond to the location of a target that moves regularly through a set of possible locations. Although participants are not informed about the existence of a sequence, they eventually learn it implicitly, as attested by the costs observed when this sequence is violated in a reduced set of control trials. Interestingly, the expression of this learning decreases immediately after a control trial, in a way that resembles the adjustments triggered in response to incongruent trials in interference tasks. These effects have been attributed to a control network involving dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and cingulate (ACC) structures. In the present work, we reviewed a group of recent studies which had inhibited DLPFC top-down control by means of non-invasive brain stimulation to increase the acquisition of ISL. In addition, as no previous study has investigated the effect inhibiting top-down control on releasing the automatic expression of ISL, we present a pre-registered – yet exploratory – study in which an inhibitory continuous theta burst stimulation protocol was applied over an anterior-ventral portion of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) highly interconnected with the ACC, and whose activity has been specifically linked to motor control (i.e., Right DLPFC, n=10 or the Left DLPFC, n=10), compared to active Vertex stimulation (n=10). Contrary to our hypotheses, the preliminary results did not show evidence for the involvement of such region in the expression of ISL. We discussed the results in the context of the set of contradictory findings reported in the systematic review.

A new study by Fabrice Parmentier and Laura Gallego has just been accepted for publication in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. While previous work has shown that the predictability of the unexpected sounds reduces distraction, this study is the first to show that the predictability of the task stimuli and responses does not protect participants from auditory distraction. With an Impact Factor of 5.536 in 2020, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review is the 6th best journal in Experimental Psychology in the world. View the paper on Springer Nature’s Sharedit.This work formed part of Laura Gallego’s placement as student collaborator working with Fabrice Parmentier. Abstract: Past studies show that novel, task-irrelevant, auditory stimuli, presented in the context of an otherwise repeated standard sound, capture participants’ attention away from a focal task, resulting in behavioral distraction. While evidence has shown that making novel sounds predictable reduces or eliminates distraction, it remains unknown whether predictable target stimuli can also shield participants from novelty distraction. Using a serial reaction time task, we installed the learning of a sequence of target stimuli before testing the impact of novel sounds on performance for this sequence compared to a new one. 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. Novel 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 novelty distraction and that the latter is an obligatory attentional effect.Reference: Parmentier, F. B. R., & Gallego, L. (2020). Is deviance distraction immune to the prior sequential learning of stimuli and responses? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 27, 490-497.Latest update: This work has been accepted for oral presentation at the 62d Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, in New Orleans, USA, 4-7 November 2021.

Antonia Siquier at the CEIP Nicolau Calafat school in Valldemossa As part of the a series of activities aimed at promoting gender equality in science and encouraging young people to get interested in research, Antonia Siquier met students at the CEIP Nicolau Calafat school in Valldemossa to talk to them about her experience as a researcher in neuropsychology and cognition. This presentation is part of an initiative by the local government in which the IdISBa is participating, sending scientists from a variety of disciplines to schools and educational centers from February 3rd to 11th. The activity aims to awake an interest in science in young people to promote science, highlighting feminine roles in scientific fields.