Abstract: Sounds deviating from an otherwise repeated stream of task-irrelevant stimuli (deviant stimulus among standard stimulus) are known to capture attention involuntarily and impact negatively on ongoing behavioral performance (behavioral oddball distraction). The traditional view proposes that the deviant sounds’ low probability of occurrence (relative to that of the standard) constitutes a sufficient condition for behavioral distraction. Contrary to this contention, Parmentier et al. (2010) demonstrated that distraction by deviant sounds is not ineluctable and only occurs when distractive auditory stimuli, though to-be-ignored, act as useful warning cues by providing information as to whether and when a target stimulus is to be presented. The present study demonstrated the role of distracters’ information value; in auditory-visual and pure auditory oddball tasks and sought to disentangle the roles of different types of information conveyed by the distracter stimuli: temporal information (target’s time of occurrence) and event information (the information that a target’s imminent presentation is certain). The results suggest that event information mediates behavioral distraction and plays an important role in both the cross-modal and pure auditory oddball tasks.

Key words: Novelty Distraction, Event Information, Temporal Information, Cross-modality, Pure Auditory Modality