Any Tom, Dick, or Harry will do : Hearing one's own name distracts no more than any other in a cross-modal oddball task

• Research of the distractor value of hearing the own name has shown that this self-referring stimulus captures attention in an involuntary fashion and creates distraction. The behavioral studies are few and the outcomes are not always clear cut. In this study, the distraction by 'own names' compared to control names (controlling for familiarity, gender and number of syllables) or matched neutral words was investigated in 2 experiments using a cross-modal oddball task. Participants completed a visual categorization task while exposed to either a sine wave tone as a standard stimulus (75% of thetrials) or unexpected auditory deviants (12.5% trials for eachname category in Experiment 1, and 10 % for each name category and for words in Experiment 2). Results showed deviant distraction by exposure to both the irrelevant word, own and the control name compare to the standard tone but no differences were found showing that the own name captured attention and distracted the participants more than an irrelevant word or a control name. The results elucidate the role of the own name as a potent auditory distractor and possible limitations with its theoretical significance for general theories of attention are discussed.

Subject headings

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Psykologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Psychology (hsv//eng)

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

kon (subject category)