AI Article Synopsis
- New and surprising events are crucial for survival, as they help organisms respond to their environments.
- Researchers investigated how complex tasks affect brain responses to unexpected sounds while participants tracked a moving target with a joystick.
- The study found that as task difficulty increased, the brain's ability to process new auditory information was reduced, suggesting that attention and resources are limited during challenging tasks.
Article Abstract
New, unusual, and changing events are important environmental cues, and the ability to detect these types of stimuli in the environment constitutes a biologically significant survival skill. We used event-related potentials to examine whether sensory and cognitive neural responses to unattended novel events are modulated by the complexity of a primary visuomotor task. Event-related potentials were elicited by unattended task-irrelevant pitch-deviant tones and novel environmental sounds while study participants performed a continuous visuomotor tracking task at two levels of difficulty, achieved by manipulating the control dynamics of a joystick. The results revealed that increased task complexity modulated evoked sensory and cognitive event-related potential components, indicating that detection of change and novelty in the unattended auditory channel is resource-limited.
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| http://dx.doi.org/10.1097/00001756-200507130-00001 | DOI Listing |
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