The neurophysiological effects of distraction on sustained attention

Maintaining attention over time is essential for everyday life, and mental effort is required to avoid vigilance decrements and interference from distraction. Many factors directly affect the sustained attention, especially distractor, which is the great challenge for keeping the attention. However, there has been less work focusing on the effects of distractor. In this work, a novel experimental paradigm is proposed with the manipulation of demands on cognitive control, and then based on electroencephalogram (EEG) signal, Event related potential (ERP) analysis was used to measure neural activity to explore the neural mechanism of distractor affecting the sustained attention. By comparing ERP features in the distraction condition to the condition without distraction, it can be shown that distractor reduces the amplitude of N2 component, which would be in accordance with the delay and increased amplitude in the P300 component, which reflect that evaluation and classification in distraction condition need a longer period of time and more mental efforts to process or categorize the target stimuli. The findings suggest that distractor affects sustained attention by impairing the ability to process, detect and categorize a stimulus as being a target, and distraction increases the difficulty of the task, evaluation and classification in distraction condition need a longer period of time and more mental efforts.