Attention Capture : Studying the Distracting effect of One´s Own Name

This study examined the attention capturing effect by one’s own name using a cross-modal oddball task. It was hypothesized that one’s own name would yield more distraction than a familiar name and a random name. Twenty-one participants (mean = 23.48 year) took part in the experiment. A standard sound and three deviant sounds were used (own name, a familiar name and a random name). The results revealed that the deviant sounds yielded longer response times than the standard sound (all p's<.05), a familiar name yielded longer response time than one's own name (p=.036), but, no difference in response latencies between the random name and the other names were found. It’s concluded that the own name may speed up responses due to arousal, while the familiar name on the other hand act more distracting. Lack of power can possibly explain some of the results, and a reaction time task may disentangle possible differences not shown in this study