Abstract
Distraction by background speech stimuli irrelevant to the task to perform was examined using event related potentials. The task of the participants was to respond by pressing the key when a red circle was presented on the display. Thirty red circles and 170 blue circles were displayed one at a time for 1s with the inter-stimulus interval of 1.5s. The number of participants was 24 for Experiment 1, and 23 for Experiment 2. In Experiment 2, recorded news about the university was presented during the visual task, and the participant was instructed to ignore it. After finishing the task, the participant was asked to perform recognition test about the ignored message, and to rate his/her own interest to the news. The P300 amplitude was find to have a significant negative correlation with the recognition test score, as well as with the rating of interest to the news.
