Involuntary attention and distractibility as evaluated with event-related brain potentials

This article reviews recent event-related brain potential (ERP) studies of involuntary attention and distractibility in response to novelty and change in the acoustic environment. These studies show that the mismatch negativi ty, N-1 and P-3a ERP components elicited by deviant or novel sounds in an u nattended sequence of repetitive stimuli index different processes along th e course to involuntary attention switch to distracting stimuli. These stud ies used new auditory-auditory and auditory-visual distraction paradigms, w hich enable one to assess objectively abnormal distractibility in several c linical patient groups, such as those suffering from closed-head injuries o r chronic alcoholism. Copyright (C) 2000 S. Karger AG, Basel.