Department of Psychology, Bournemouth University, Poole, UK.
Department of Psychology and Research Institute for Health Sciences (iUNICS), University of the Balearic Islands, Palma, Spain.
Psychophysiology. 2023 Dec;60(12):e14389. doi: 10.1111/psyp.14389. Epub 2023 Jul 14.
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.
新颖的声音，如果与重复的声音序列意外偏离，众所周知会引起分心。这种意外的声音也被证明会引起全身运动抑制，这表明它们引发了一种神经生理反应，旨在停止正在进行的动作。最近，来自眼球运动的证据表明，意想不到的声音也会在阅读过程中暂时停止眼睛的运动，尽管尚不清楚这种影响是由于眼球运动计划的抑制还是语言过程的抑制。在这里，我们试图通过将自然阅读任务与字母扫描任务进行比较来区分这两种可能性，该任务涉及与阅读相似的眼球运动需求，但没有更高水平的词汇处理。参与者要么阅读句子以理解，要么在三种听觉条件下扫描这些句子的字母串以寻找字母“o”：无声、标准和新颖的声音。结果表明，新颖的声音在这两种任务中同样具有干扰性，这表明它们通常会抑制正在进行的眼球运动过程，而与词汇处理无关。这些结果表明，新颖的声音可能对眼球运动控制具有全局抑制作用。
