Electrophysiological correlates of inattentional deafness: no hearing without listening

Abstract

The analysis of airplane accidents reveals that pilots sometimes purely fail to notice yet critical auditory alerts. This inability of an auditory stimulus to reach consciousness has been recently coined under the term of inattentional deafness. Recent data from literature tend to show that tasks involving high perceptual load consume most of attentional capacity, leaving little for processing any taskirrelevant information. In addition, there is a growing body of evidence for a shared attentional capacity between vision and hearing. In this context, the numerous displays in cockpits are likely to produce inattentional deafness. A simplified piloting task was conceived, in which participants were required to make decisions based on complex visual indicators while continuous electroencephalographic(EEG) measurements were performed. During the task, a tone was played, either standard, which participants were told to ignore, or deviant (“the alarm”, probability = 0.10) which participants were told to report. Preliminary behavioural results showed that up to 30% of deviant sounds were not detected. The analysis of EEG showed that a drastic diminution of the auditory P300 amplitude was concomitant with the occurrence of the inattentional deafness phenomenon. Applications concern integrative online prevention of alarms omission, mental workload measurements and enhanced warning designs.