The impact of spoken action words on performance in a cross-modal oddball task

• In this study a cross-modal oddball task was employed to study the effect that words spokeneither non-urgently or urgently would have on a digit categorization task and if women wouldexhibit greater behavioral inhibitory control. The words were unrelated to the task itself, butrelated to the action required to complete the task. Forty participants (21 women) conducteda computerized categorization task while exposed to a sinewave tone as a standard stimulus(75% of the trials) or a to-be ignored word (press, stop) spoken either non-urgently orurgently as unexpected auditory deviant stimulus (6.25% trials for each category). Urgentwords had sharp intonation and an average fundamental frequency (F0) ranging from 191.9(stop) to 204.6 (press) Hz. Non-urgent words had low intonation with average F0 rangingfrom 103.9.9 (stop) to 120.3 (press) Hz. As expected, deviant distraction and longerresponse times were found by exposure to the word stop, but deviant distraction was notfound to be significant with the word press or due to intonation. While the results showedthat women had in general longer reaction times, there were no gender differences foundrelated to the deviant distraction caused by word or intonation. The present results do notsupport the hypothesis that women have greater behavioral inhibitory control, but there wasevidence that the meaning of the word could influence response times.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Psykologi -- Psykologi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Psychology -- Psychology (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Maskinteknik -- Produktionsteknik, arbetsvetenskap och ergonomi (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Mechanical Engineering -- Production Engineering, Human Work Science and Ergonomics (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

attention

distraction

emotion

kognition

Psychology

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)