My current research focus on how attention can be captured by deviating stimuli. I will briefly describe the paradigm I have used – the cross-modal oddball task. Before I go into the cross-modal oddball task I will describe the auditory oddball task. In the oddball paradigm the subjects are exposed to a repetitive stream of distracting sounds. Furthermore, they can be either passive (i.e., watching a film) or engaged in a task (i.e., making judgments of durations of the tones). Typically subjects are exposed to two types of distractors; one standard, presented frequently (i.e., 80 % of trials), and an oddball (‘Novel’ or ‘Deviant’) presented on infrequent trials (i.e., 20 % of the trials).
There is a plethora of research using the oddball paradigm in examining electrophysiological responses (i.e., ERPs) to deviating sounds (for reviews see; Bendixen, SanMiguel, & Schröger, 2012; Friedman, Cycowicz, & Gaeta, 2001). However, when engaged in a primary task there is also a behavioral cost – the response time to target tone is slowed by the presentation of a deviant (e.g., Berti, 2008).