The importance of paying attention to a task at hand isemphasized from an early age and extends throughout life.The costs of attentional focus, however, include the potentialto miss important changes in the environment, so some processfor monitoring nontask information is essential. In this study, amodel of latent cognitive variables was applied to data obtainedfrom a two-alternative forced-choice task where participantsidentified the longer of two sounds. Using an adaptive proceduretask, accuracy was maintained at a higher or lower levelcreating two difficulties, and the sounds were heard eitherwhere frequency changes in the sound were rare or common(oddball and multistandard conditions, respectively). Frequencychanges created stimulus-driven “distraction” effects in theoddball sequence only, and cognitive modeling (using the linearballistic accumulator) attributed these effects to slowedaccumulation of evidence about tone length on these trials.Concurrent recording of auditory ERPs revealed these delaysin evidence accumulation to be related to the amplitude ofN2 or mismatch negativity period and P300 response components.In contrast, the response time on trials after a rarefrequency change was associated with increased caution indecision-making. Results support the utility of mapping behavioraland ERP measures of performance to latent cognitiveprocesses that contribute to performance and are consistentwith a momentary diversion of resources to evaluate the deviantsound feature and remodel predictions about sound.
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