Unexpected perceptual changes in the environment (so called oddball stimuli), such as sounds deviating from a repeated stream of task-irrelevant auditory stimuli (deviant sounds among standard sounds), capture attention and can affect negatively task performance. This is known as distraction. The present study used a cross-modal oddball task in which participants had to categorize visual left and right arrows while instructed to ignore irrelevant sounds (standard and deviant sounds, "izquierda" and "derecha"). The deviant sounds could vary on their degree of congruency (20%, 50% or 80%) with the visual arrow depending on the experimental condition. The results show that deviant sounds delay responses to a visual target and, more importantly, that the semantic content of the deviant sounds is analyzed. This semantic effect varies depending on expectations regarding the relationship between distractor and target in each congruence condition. Furthermore, expectations can reduce the impact of
conflict between target and distractors