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Auditory attention: the influence of tonic arousal at the behavioral and physiological levels
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Poster D102 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Anne Mathieu1, Aurélie Grandjean1, Sophie Chen1, Andreas Widmann2,3, Nicole Wetzel2,4, Aurélie Bidet-Caulet1; 1Aix-Marseille Université, Inserm, Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes (INS), Marseille, France, 2Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology, Magdeburg, Germany, 3Institute of Psychology, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany, 4Center for Behavioral Brain Sciences, Magdeburg, Germany
The control of attention requires a good balance between voluntary and involuntary attention. Distraction by unexpected auditory events often occurs in daily life and can be important to adapt to environmental situations. Although it has been shown that unexpected salient sounds impair task-performance, an increasing number of studies demonstrated that unexpected stimuli can be beneficial for the performance. Current theories attribute this beneficial effect to a transient increase in the arousal level, under the control of the Locus Coeruleus – Norepinephrine (LC-NE) system. Animal studies suggest that tonic and phasic activity of the LC-NE system are linked, with an intermediate level of tonic arousal accompanied by high phasic bursts and optimal performance. The objective of the study was to investigate the impact of tonic arousal on voluntary and involuntary attention and on phasic arousal at behavioral and physiological levels in Human. We modulated the tonic arousal by using calm and exciting music extracts. We recorded electroencephalography, pupil dilation, skin conductance and heart rate in 16 healthy young adults performing the Competitive Attention Task. At the behavioral level, an increase in tonic arousal appears to be associated with an increase in voluntary orienting of attention. At the physiological levels, results suggest that skin conductance is sensitive to the tonic arousal level; while pupil dilation is more sensitive to phasic modulations. Event-Related Potentials to the target sounds were found reduced under low tonic arousal level. Event-Related Potential to the distractor sounds were also modulated by the tonic arousal level, showing a complex interaction between the arousing content of the distractor, the level of tonic arousal, and the level of attention preparation. In summary, these results show that tonic arousal can modulate the processing of both task-relevant and task-irrelevant sounds.
Topic Areas: Control, Selection, and Executive Processes,