The sound of silence: Binding and retrieval of silence in distractor-response binding

In human action control, executing a response is assumed to integrate features of the response and the stimulus into short-term episodic traces known as event files. Repeating any of the features comprised in the event file in a later episode leads to retrieval of other integrated features and can influence current behavior. Event files can include task-relevant features, and task-irrelevant features also can be bound to responses, termed distractor-response binding. Distractor-response binding effects have been shown in multimodal settings, such as for auditory distractors and visual targets. Recently, it has been suggested that silence can be perceived rather than just being cognitively inferred as the absence of sound. In the present study (combined N = 120), we used auditory distractors in a distractor-response binding task and investigated whether silence as a distractor (i.e., the absence of presented sound) can be bound to a response and subsequently retrieve this response from an event file. We found that silence as a distractor produced a typical distractor-response binding effect, which, furthermore, did not differ in size from the distractor-response binding effect when two sounds were used as distractors. The present findings indicate that silence operates similarly to sound as an auditory distractor in binding and retrieval in action control and support the notion that moments of absence can elicit perceptual event representations.