The Impact of Cognitive Load on the Cardiac Orienting Response to Auditory Structural Features during Natural Radio Listening Situations

Previous research has shown that structural features such as voice changes, jingle onsets, and production effects in a radio broadcast elicit cardiac orienting responses. In fact, the voice change has been shown to reliably elicit orienting without habituation after several repetitions. However, repeated onsets of two other auditory structural features—jingles and production effects—did result in habituation when the participant was exposed to them embedded in an audio production absent a central cognitive task. This article presents two experiments testing the possibility that adding a central task prevents the development of a robust neural model of the auditory structural features necessary for habituation. In both studies, results show that adding a primary cognitive task eliminated habituation to jingles and production effects. However, varying the cognitive load of the primary task across two levels of difficulty had no significant effect on habituation.