Patrik Sörqvist, Psychology, Gävle Högskola

2011-2016

The project's overarching aim was to study the relation between the cognitive and the physiological mechanisms of hearing. The purpose was more specifically to study how cognitive load, manipulated by varying the difficulty in a working memory task, influences the susceptibility to distracting sound in the environment, in part by conducting physiological measurements of the response to the sound and in part by collecting behavioral data. The intention was also to study how these responses varied with individual differences in working memory capacity.

The purpose has not changed during the project, but the scope has broadened. New measurement techniques have been added. An fMRI study has been conducted to obtain a bread picture of the neural/physiological mechanisms involved in the tradeoff between cognitive load and the brain's response to background sound. A number of experiments have been conducted in order to specify the nature of the cognitive mechanisms which controls the relation between load and background processing. And several studies have been made on the attempt to show that the results generated from theoretical/laboratory studies generalize to more applied contexts.

An important result from the project experiments is that higher cognitive load (working memory load) constrains the brainstem's response on background sound. The brainstem is a very early part of the processing of incoming sound, from the point at which the sound reaches the ear till it ends up in the brain's cortical system. The result is of theoretical value as it contributes to the resolution of a debate about selective attention and whether the filtering of task-irrelevant information takes place at an early or at a late part of the processing chain.

Another important result from the project is embodied in more applied experiments. The relation between mental load in a visual-verbal task and the responsiveness to background sound arises also in the context of applied tasks. Three experiments with somewhat different designs show that proofreading and memory of written prose are less distracter by background noise when the mental load in the task increases, for example when the text material is presented in an unfamiliar font.

A third important result from the research project is that two separable but complementary mechanisms underpin the relation between cognitive load and distractibility. One mechanism is sensory suppression, by which the neural response to a background sound is inhibited when the mental load increases. The other mechanism is the steadfastness of the locus-of-attention. When mental load increases, the steadfastness of the attentional locus to the task-relevant material increases, and this makes attention less prone to answer the call from changes in the surrounding.

New research questions have arisen during the research project, in particular questions concerning the nature of working memory and the relation between working memory and basic learning. An established view is that working memory assists online cognition by combating distraction and maintaining information in mind. Our results suggest that working memory capacity should instead be conceptualized as the trait capacity to mentally engage in the task, which carries with it both profits and costs in the form of reduced distractibility but also constrained perception of what is going on in the surrounding environment.
The involvement of researchers from abroad certifies the international abutment of the research project. A number of publications have been generated together with researchers from the United Kingdom. Results from the project have also been presented at international conferences and in journals with very broad international spread.

Besides the scientific publications, parts of the project have also been communicated to professionals outside the scientific community. The results were presented at the Region day for Ear, Nose and Throat, on November 17, 2014.

The project's two most important publications are authored by Sörqvist, Stenfelt and Rönnberg, published in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 2012, and by Sörqvist and Marsh, published in Current Directions in Psychological Science 2015. The article from 2012 marks the starting point of the project wherein the basic ideas are presented and provided with empirical support, the article from 2015 reviews the project results in a general and accessible way.

The project has in total generated seven peer-reviewed journal articles and another journal manuscript that is under way. All journal articles have been published in journals with a good reputation, four of them published in the subject area's top journals. We have also made the strategic decision to publish one article in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, in part to reach a broader audience at the national level and in part with the intention to strengthen the journal. In cases where the journals have offered opportunity to claim open access for a fee, the fee has been payed. Other journals, wherein we have published results from the project, either offer the possibility to make the article available in digital systems after an embargo period or to make the article available in manuscript form in digital systems. In these cases, the articles have been made available in the digital systems ResearchGate and DiVA.

Publication list - journal articles
Halin, N., Marsh, J. E., Haga, A., Holmgren, M., & Sörqvist, P. (2014). Effects of speech on proofreading: Can task-engagement manipulations shield against distraction? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 20, 69-80.
Halin, N., Marsh, J. E., Hellman, A., Hellström, I., & Sörqvist, P. (2014). A shield against distraction. Journal of Applied Research in Memory & Cognition, 3, 31-36.
Halin, N., Marsh, J. E., & Sörqvist, P. (2015). Central load reduces peripheral processing: Evidence from incidental memory of background speech. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology.
Marsh, J. E., Sörqvist, P. Hughes, R. W. (2015). Dynamic cognitive control of irrelevant sound: Increased task engagement attenuates semantic auditory distraction. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 41, 1462-1474.
Sörqvist, P., & Marsh, J. E. (2015). How concentration shields against distraction. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24, 267-272.
Sörqvist, P., & Rönnberg, J. (2014). Individual differences in distractibility: An update and a model. PsyCh Journal, 3, 42-57.
Sörqvist, P., Stenfelt, S. & Rönnberg, J. (2012). Working memory capacity and visual-verbal cognitive load modulate auditory-sensory gating in the brainstem: Toward a unified view of attention. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 24, 2147-2154.

Manuscript not yet published
Sörqvist, P., Dahlström, Ö., Karlsson, T., Stenfelt, S., & Rönnberg, J. (in preperation). A new early-filter theory: Cognitive load modulates the activity in the outer haircells.

Publication list - conference contributions
Halin, N., Marsh, J., & Sörqvist, P. (2015). Higher task difficulty shields against background speech. Presented at BCEP 2015, 11th Biennial Conference on Environmental Psychology, Bridging theory and practice: inspiring the future of environmental psychology, 24-26 August 2015, Groningen, The Netherlands
Marsh, J., Sörqvist, P., & Hughes, R. (2013). Cognitive control of distraction: How does task engagement modulate the effects of between-sequence semantic similarity? Presented at Psychonomic Society's 54th meeting, November 2013.
Sörqvist, P., Dahlström, Ö., Karlsson, T., & Rönnberg, J. (2015). Central/cognitive load modulates peripheral/perceptual processing. Presented at the Third International Conference on Cognitive Hearing Science for Communication, 14-17 June, 2015, Linköping, Sweden.
Sörqvist, P., Marsh, J., & Halin, N. (2015). How concentration shields against distraction. Presented at the 32nd BPS Cognitive Psychology Section Annual Conference, 1-3 September 2015, University of Kent, Kent, UK.

Web pages
www.hig.se/pst
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Patrik_Soerqvist