Processing of complex distracting sounds in school-aged children and adults: evidence from EEG and MEG data

Involuntary shifts of spatial attention contribute to distraction-Evidence from oscillatory alpha power and reaction time data

Imagine you are focusing on the traffic on a busy street to ride your bike safely when suddenly you hear the siren of an ambulance. This unexpected sound involuntarily captures your attention and interferes with ongoing performance. We tested whether this type of distraction involves a spatial shift of attention. We measured behavioral data and magnetoencephalographic alpha power during a cross-modal paradigm that combined an exogenous cueing task and a distraction task. In 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. Crucially, this distraction effect 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 deviant distraction.

Children's inhibition skills are associated with their P3a latency-results from an exploratory study

BACKGROUND

The P3a response is thought to reflect involuntary orienting to an unexpected stimulus and has been connected with set-shifting and inhibition in some studies. In our exploratory study, we investigated if the amplitude and the latency of the P3a response were associated with the performance in a modified flanker task measuring inhibition and set-shifting in 10-year-old children (N = 42). Children participated in electroencephalography (EEG) measurement with an auditory multifeature paradigm including standard, deviating, and novel sounds. In addition, they performed a separate flanker task requiring inhibition and set-shifting skills.

RESULTS

The P3a latencies for deviant sounds were associated with the reaction time reflecting inhibition: the shorter the response latencies were, the faster the reaction time was. The P3a latencies for novel sounds were not linked to the reaction times reflecting either inhibition or set-shifting. In addition, the magnitude of the P3a response was not associated with the performance in the flanker task.

CONCLUSIONS

Our results suggest that P3a response latency and reaction speed reflecting inhibitory skills are based on shared neural mechanism. Thus, the present study brings new insight to the field investigating the associations between behavior and its neural indices.

Attentional control in middle childhood is highly dynamic-Strong initial distraction is followed by advanced attention control

The ability to shield against distraction while focusing on a task requires the operation of executive functions and is essential for successful learning. We investigated the short-term dynamics of distraction control in a data set of 269 children aged 4-10 years and 51 adults pooled from three studies using multilevel models. Participants performed a visual categorization task while a task-irrelevant sequence of sounds was presented which consisted of frequently repeated standard sounds and rarely interspersed novel sounds. On average, participants responded slower in the categorization task after novel sounds. This distraction effect was more pronounced in children. Throughout the experiment, the initially strong distraction effects declined to the level of adults in the groups of 6- to 10-year-olds. Such a decline was neither observed in the groups of the 4- and 5-year-olds, who consistently showed a high level of distraction, nor in adults, who showed a constantly low level of distraction throughout the experimental session. Results indicate that distraction control is a highly dynamic process that qualitatively and quantitatively differs between age groups. We conclude that the analysis of short-term dynamics provides valuable insights into the development of attention control and might explain inconsistent findings regarding distraction control in middle childhood. In addition, models of attention control need to be refined to account for age-dependent rapid learning mechanisms. Our findings have implications for the design of learning situations and provide an additional source of information for the diagnosis and treatment of children with attention deficit disorders.

Why Are Children So Distractible? Development of Attention and Motor Control From Childhood to Adulthood

Distractibility is the propensity to behaviorally react to irrelevant information. Although children are more distractible the younger they are, the precise contribution of attentional and motor components to distractibility and their developmental trajectories have not been characterized yet. We used a new behavioral paradigm to identify the developmental dynamics of components contributing to distractibility in a large cohort of French participants balanced, between age groups, in gender and socioeconomic status (N = 352; age: 6-25). Results reveal that each measure of these components, namely voluntary attention, distraction, impulsivity, and motor control, present a distinct maturational timeline. In young children, increased distractibility is mostly the result of reduced sustained attention capacities and enhanced distraction, whereas in teenagers, it is the result of decreased motor control and increased impulsivity.

Left hemispheric deficit in the sustained neuromagnetic response to periodic click trains in children with ASD

BACKGROUND

Deficits in perception and production of vocal pitch are often observed in people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but the neural basis of these deficits is unknown. In magnetoencephalogram (MEG), spectrally complex periodic sounds trigger two continuous neural responses-the auditory steady state response (ASSR) and the sustained field (SF). It has been shown that the SF in neurotypical individuals is associated with low-level analysis of pitch in the 'pitch processing center' of the Heschl's gyrus. Therefore, alternations in this auditory response may reflect atypical processing of vocal pitch. The SF, however, has never been studied in people with ASD.

METHODS

We used MEG and individual brain models to investigate the ASSR and SF evoked by monaural 40 Hz click trains in boys with ASD (N = 35) and neurotypical (NT) boys (N = 35) aged 7-12-years.

RESULTS

In agreement with the previous research in adults, the cortical sources of the SF in children were located in the left and right Heschl's gyri, anterolateral to those of the ASSR. In both groups, the SF and ASSR dominated in the right hemisphere and were higher in the hemisphere contralateral to the stimulated ear. The ASSR increased with age in both NT and ASD children and did not differ between the groups. The SF amplitude did not significantly change between the ages of 7 and 12 years. It was moderately attenuated in both hemispheres and was markedly delayed and displaced in the left hemisphere in boys with ASD. The SF delay in participants with ASD was present irrespective of their intelligence level and severity of autism symptoms.

LIMITATIONS

We did not test the language abilities of our participants. Therefore, the link between SF and processing of vocal pitch in children with ASD remains speculative.

CONCLUSION

Children with ASD demonstrate atypical processing of spectrally complex periodic sound at the level of the core auditory cortex of the left-hemisphere. The observed neural deficit may contribute to speech perception difficulties experienced by children with ASD, including their poor perception and production of linguistic prosody.

Empirical Bayes evaluation of fused EEG-MEG source reconstruction: Application to auditory mismatch evoked responses

We here turn the general and theoretical question of the complementarity of EEG and MEG for source reconstruction, into a practical empirical one. Precisely, we address the challenge of evaluating multimodal data fusion on real data. For this purpose, we build on the flexibility of Parametric Empirical Bayes, namely for EEG-MEG data fusion, group level inference and formal hypothesis testing. The proposed approach follows a two-step procedure by first using unimodal or multimodal inference to derive a cortical solution at the group level; and second by using this solution as a prior model for single subject level inference based on either unimodal or multimodal data. Interestingly, for inference based on the same data (EEG, MEG or both), one can then formally compare, as alternative hypotheses, the relative plausibility of the two unimodal and the multimodal group priors. Using auditory data, we show that this approach enables to draw important conclusions, namely on (i) the superiority of multimodal inference, (ii) the greater spatial sensitivity of MEG compared to EEG, (iii) the ability of EEG data alone to source reconstruct temporal lobe activity, (iv) the usefulness of EEG to improve MEG based source reconstruction. Importantly, we largely reproduce those findings over two different experimental conditions. We here focused on Mismatch Negativity (MMN) responses for which generators have been extensively investigated with little homogeneity in the reported results. Our multimodal inference at the group level revealed spatio-temporal activity within the supratemporal plane with a precision which, to our knowledge, has never been achieved before with non-invasive recordings.

Elevated physiological arousal is associated with larger but more variable neural responses to small acoustic change in children during a passive auditory attention task

Little is known of how autonomic arousal relates to neural responsiveness during auditory attention. We presented N = 21 5-7-year-old children with an oddball auditory mismatch paradigm, whilst concurrently measuring heart rate fluctuations. Children with higher mean autonomic arousal, as indexed by higher heart rate (HR) and decreased high-frequency (0.15-0.8 Hz) variability in HR, showed smaller amplitude N250 responses to frequently presented (70%), 500 Hz standard tones. Follow-up analyses showed that the modal evoked response was in fact similar, but accompanied by more large and small amplitude responses and greater variability in peak latency in the high HR group, causing lower averaged responses. Similar patterns were also observed when examining heart rate fluctuations within a testing session, in an analysis that controlled for between-participant differences in mean HR. In addition, we observed larger P150/P3a amplitudes in response to small acoustic contrasts (750 Hz tones) in the high HR group. Responses to large acoustic contrasts (bursts of white noise), however, evoked strong early P3a phase in all children and did not differ by high/low HR. Our findings suggest that elevated physiological arousal may be associated with high variability in auditory ERP responses in young children, along with increased responsiveness to small acoustic changes.

Maturation of Speech-Sound ERPs in 5-6-Year-Old Children: A Longitudinal Study

The maturation of 5-6-year-old children's auditory discrimination - indicated by the development of the auditory event-related-potentials (ERPs) - has not been previously studied in longitudinal settings. For the first time, we present here the results based on extensive dataset collected from 75 children. We followed the 5- to 6-year-olds for 20 months and measured their ERPs four times with the same multifeature paradigm with phonemic stimuli. The amplitude of the mismatch negativity (MMN) response increased during this time for vowel, vowel duration and frequency changes. Furthermore, the P3a component started to mature toward adult-like positivity for the vowel, intensity and frequency deviants and the late discriminative negativity (LDN) component decreased with age for vowel and intensity deviants. All the changes in the components seemed to happen during the second follow-up year, when Finnish children are taught letter symbols and other preliminary academic skills before going to school at the age of seven. Therefore, further studies are needed to clarify if these changes in the auditory discrimination are purely age-related or due to increasing linguistic knowledge of the children.

Estimating the Timing of Cognitive Operations With MEG/EEG Latency Measures: A Primer, a Brief Tutorial, and an Implementation of Various Methods

The major advantage of MEG/EEG over other neuroimaging methods is its high temporal resolution. Examining the latency of well-studied components can provide a window into the dynamics of cognitive operations beyond traditional response-time (RT) measurements. While RTs reflect the cumulative duration of all time-consuming cognitive operations involved in a task, component latencies can partition this time into cognitively meaningful sub-steps. Surprisingly, most MEG/EEG studies neglect this advantage and restrict analyses to component amplitudes without considering latencies. The major reasons for this neglect might be that, first, the most easily accessible latency measure (peak latency) is often unreliable and that, second, more complex measures are difficult to conceive, implement, and parametrize. The present article illustrates the key advantages and disadvantages of the three main types of latency-measures (peak latency, onset latency, and percent-area latency), introduces a MATLAB function that extracts all these measures and is compatible with common analysis tools, discusses the most important parameter choices for different research questions and components of interest, and demonstrates its use by various group analyses on one planar gradiometer pair of the publicly available Wakeman and Henson (2015) data. The introduced function can extract from group data not only single-subject latencies, but also grand-average and jackknife latencies. Furthermore, it gives the choice between different approaches to automatically set baselines and anchor points for latency estimation, approaches that were partly developed by me and that capitalize on the informational richness of MEG/EEG data. Although the function comes with a wide range of customization parameters, the default parameters are set so that even beginners get reasonable results. Graphical depictions of latency estimates, baselines, and anchor points overlaid on individual averages further support learning, understanding and trouble-shooting. Once extracted, latency estimates can be submitted to any analysis also available for (averaged) RTs, including tests for mean differences, correlational approaches and cognitive modeling.

Can't Ignore-Distraction by Task-Irrelevant Sounds in Early and Middle Childhood

Attention control abilities are relevant for learning success. Little is known about the development of audio-visual attention in early childhood. Four groups of children between the ages of 4 and 10 years and adults performed an audio-visual distraction paradigm (N = 106). Multilevel analyses revealed increased reaction times in a visual categorization task when task-irrelevant novel sounds were presented, demonstrating involuntary distraction of attention. This distraction effect decreased with age and significantly differed between age groups. In addition, the two youngest age groups responded with a delay in trials following a distractor trial, indicating delayed reallocation of attention to the task at hand. Results indicate a significant maturation of audio-visual attention control within a few years during early childhood that continues throughout middle childhood.

Weighting of Amplitude and Formant Rise Time Cues by School-Aged Children: A Mismatch Negativity Study

PURPOSE

An important skill in the development of speech perception is to apply optimal weights to acoustic cues so that phonemic information is recovered from speech with minimum effort. Here, we investigated the development of acoustic cue weighting of amplitude rise time (ART) and formant rise time (FRT) cues in children as measured by mismatch negativity (MMN).

METHOD

Twelve adults and 36 children aged 6-12 years listened to a /ba/-/wa/ contrast in an oddball paradigm in which the standard stimulus had the ART and FRT cues of /ba/. In different blocks, the deviant stimulus had either the ART or FRT cues of /wa/.

RESULTS

The results revealed that children younger than 10 years were sensitive to both ART and FRT cues whereas 10- to 12-year-old children and adults were sensitive only to FRT cues. Moreover, children younger than 10 years generated a positive mismatch response, whereas older children and adults generated MMN.

CONCLUSION

These results suggest that preattentive adultlike weighting of ART and FRT cues is attained only by 10 years of age and accompanies the change from mismatch response to the more mature MMN response.

SUPPLEMENTAL MATERIAL

https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.6207608.

Equivalent auditory distraction in children and adults

There is an ongoing debate about whether children have more problems ignoring auditory distractors than adults. This is an important empirical question with direct implications for theories making predictions about the development of selective attention. In two experiments, the disruptive effect of to-be-ignored speech on short-term memory performance of third graders, fourth graders, fifth graders, younger adults, and older adults was examined. Three auditory conditions were compared: (a) steady state sequences in which the same distractor was repeated, (b) changing state sequences in which different distractors were presented, and (c) auditory deviant sequences in which a deviant distractor was presented in a sequence of repeated distractors. According to the attentional resource view, children should exhibit larger disruption by changing and deviant sounds due to their poorer attentional control abilities compared with adults. The duplex-mechanism account proposes that the auditory deviant effect is under attentional control, whereas the changing state effect is not, and thus predicts that children should be more susceptible to auditory deviants than adults but equally disrupted by changing state sequences. According to the renewed view of age-related distraction, there should be no age differences in cross-modal auditory distraction because some of the irrelevant auditory information can be filtered out early in the processing stream. Children and adults were equally disrupted by changing and deviant speech sounds regardless of whether task difficulty was equated between age groups or not. These results are consistent with the renewed view of age-related distraction.

Distraction by Novel and Pitch-Deviant Sounds in Children

The control of attention is an important part of our executive functions and enables us to focus on relevant information and to ignore irrelevant information. The ability to shield against distraction by task-irrelevant sounds is suggested to mature during school age. The present study investigated the developmental time course of distraction in three groups of children aged 7–10 years. Two different types of distractor sounds that have been frequently used in auditory attention research—novel environmental and pitch-deviant sounds—were presented within an oddball paradigm while children performed a visual categorization task. Reaction time measurements revealed decreasing distractor-related impairment with age. Novel environmental sounds impaired performance in the categorization task more than pitch-deviant sounds. The youngest children showed a pronounced decline of novel-related distraction effects throughout the experimental session. Such a significant decline as a result of practice was not observed in the pitch-deviant condition and not in older children. We observed no correlation between cross-modal distraction effects and performance in standardized tests of concentration and visual distraction. Results of the cross-modal distraction paradigm indicate that separate mechanisms underlying the processing of novel environmental and pitch-deviant sounds develop with different time courses and that these mechanisms develop considerably within a few years in middle childhood.

Neural processing of amplitude and formant rise time in dyslexia

This study aimed to investigate how children with dyslexia weight amplitude rise time (ART) and formant rise time (FRT) cues in phonetic discrimination. Passive mismatch responses (MMR) were recorded for a/ba/-/wa/contrast in a multiple deviant odd-ball paradigm to identify the neural response to cue weighting in 17 children with dyslexia and 17 age-matched control children. The deviant stimuli had either partial or full ART or FRT cues. The results showed that ART did not generate an MMR in either group, whereas both partial and full FRT cues generated MMR in control children while only full FRT cues generated MMR in children with dyslexia. These findings suggest that children, both controls and those with dyslexia, discriminate speech based on FRT cues and not ART cues. However, control children have greater sensitivity to FRT cues in speech compared to children with dyslexia.

Infant and adult pupil dilation in response to unexpected sounds

Surprisingly occurring sounds outside the focus of attention can involuntarily capture attention. This study focuses on the impact of deviant sounds on the pupil size as a marker of auditory involuntary attention in infants. We presented an oddball paradigm including four types of deviant sounds within a sequence of repeated standard sounds to 14-month-old infants and to adults. Environmental and noise deviant sounds elicited a strong pupil dilation response (PDR) in both age groups. In contrast, moderate frequency deviants elicited a significant PDR in adults only. Moreover, a principal component analysis revealed two components underlying the PDR. Component scores differ, depending on deviant types, between age groups. Results indicate age effects of parasympathetic inhibition and sympathetic activation of the pupil size caused by deviant sounds with a high arousing potential. Results demonstrate that the PDR is a sensitive tool for the investigation of involuntary attention to sounds in preverbal children.

On the development of auditory distraction: A review

The present review focuses on the development of involuntary attention mechanisms in the context of the occurrence of unexpected events during childhood. We introduce a prevailing three-stage model of auditory involuntary attention describing the processes leading to, accompanying, and following the distraction of attention by prediction violations: (a) the automatic detection of prediction violations (associated with the event-related potential [ERP] component mismatch negativity [MMN]), (b) the involuntary orienting of attention processes towards the prediction violating sound (associated with the ERP component P3a), and (c) the reorienting back to task-relevant information (associated with the ERP components reorienting negativity [RON] or late discriminative negativity [LDN]). Within this framework we give an overview of studies investigating MMN, P3a, RON/LDN, and behavioral distraction effects in children. We discuss the development of the underlying involuntary attention mechanisms and highlight the relevance of and future perspectives for this important field of research.

Statistical context shapes stimulus-specific adaptation in human auditory cortex

Stimulus-specific adaptation is the phenomenon whereby neural response magnitude decreases with repeated stimulation. Inconsistencies between recent nonhuman animal recordings and computational modeling suggest dynamic influences on stimulus-specific adaptation. The present human electroencephalography (EEG) study investigates the potential role of statistical context in dynamically modulating stimulus-specific adaptation by examining the auditory cortex-generated N1 and P2 components. As in previous studies of stimulus-specific adaptation, listeners were presented with oddball sequences in which the presentation of a repeated tone was infrequently interrupted by rare spectral changes taking on three different magnitudes. Critically, the statistical context varied with respect to the probability of small versus large spectral changes within oddball sequences (half of the time a small change was most probable; in the other half a large change was most probable). We observed larger N1 and P2 amplitudes (i.e., release from adaptation) for all spectral changes in the small-change compared with the large-change statistical context. The increase in response magnitude also held for responses to tones presented with high probability, indicating that statistical adaptation can overrule stimulus probability per se in its influence on neural responses. Computational modeling showed that the degree of coadaptation in auditory cortex changed depending on the statistical context, which in turn affected stimulus-specific adaptation. Thus the present data demonstrate that stimulus-specific adaptation in human auditory cortex critically depends on statistical context. Finally, the present results challenge the implicit assumption of stationarity of neural response magnitudes that governs the practice of isolating established deviant-detection responses such as the mismatch negativity.