The Surprising Robustness of Visual Search Against Concurrent Auditory Distraction

People often complain about distraction by irrelevant sounds that reportedly hamper performance on concurrent visual tasks demanding the allocation of focused attention toward relevant stimuli, such as processing street signs during driving. To study this everyday issue experimentally, we devised a cross-modal distraction paradigm, inspired by a standard visual-distraction paradigm (additional-singleton paradigm) that is highly sensitive to measure interference on the allocation of attention. In a visual-search pop-out task, participants reported whether a salient target (a tilted bar) was present or absent, while a completely irrelevant, but salient auditory distractor accompanied some trials. To our surprise, the results revealed no notable distraction on visual-search performance (controlled for speed-accuracy tradeoffs). Reliable auditory distraction failed to occur even when the distractor was a (highly salient) auditory oddball or was additionally presented with a temporal advantage of 300 ms. However, when the auditory modality was made relevant globally while maintaining its irrelevance to the visual-search task, we finally observed the expected interference effect.