Entrainment to an auditory signal: Is attention involved?

Abstract

Many natural auditory signals, including music and language, change periodically. The effect of such auditory rhythms on the brain is unclear however. One widely held view, dynamic attending theory, proposes that the attentional system entrains to the rhythm and increases attention at moments of rhythmic salience. In support, 2 experiments reported here show reduced response times to visual letter strings shown at auditory rhythm peaks, compared with rhythm troughs. However, we argue that an account invoking the entrainment of general attention should further predict rhythm entrainment to also influence memory for visual stimuli. In 2 pseudoword memory experiments we find evidence against this prediction. Whether a pseudoword is shown during an auditory rhythm peak or not is irrelevant for its later recognition memory in silence. Other attention manipulations, dividing attention and focusing attention, did result in a memory effect. This raises doubts about the suggested attentional nature of rhythm entrainment. We interpret our findings as support for auditory rhythm perception being based on auditory-motor entrainment, not general attention entrainment. Keywords: attention, entrainment, rhythm, memory, word memorySupplemental materials: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000246.suppMany natural auditory signals change periodically, such as cricket chirps, bird song, and human speech and music. Many nonhuman animals have been found to use auditory periodicities to entrain their motor behavior to an underlying beat (Schachner, Brady, Pepperberg, & Hauser, 2009). What is the effect of auditory temporal regularities on humans? One widely influential theory suggests that the fluctuations inherent in "attentional energy" are affected. According to this dynamic attending theory (DAT; Jones, Boltz, & Kidd, 1982;Large & Jones, 1999), rhythmic perceptual input leads to the optimal allocation of attention: attentional fluctuations peak at the right moment when important input is expected. These attentional dynamics are crucial for music (Jones & Boltz, 1989) and speech comprehension (Pitt & Samuel, 1990). In the present experiments we investigate whether an auditory rhythm indeed affects attention, an effect which should be visible on a variety of tasks. To foreshadow our results, we find an effect for entrainment during immediate judgment tasks, but no effect for memory tasks. These findings suggest that auditory entrainment is actually quite limited. We propose that rhythmic entrainment may not affect general attention as suggested by the dominant interpretation of DAT, but instead results from auditory-motor entrainment.The DAT has been very influential as evidenced by more than 800 citations for two key papers each (per a Google Scholar search in March 2016; Jones & Boltz, 1989;Large & Jones, 1999). One behavioral demonstration of auditory entrainment is reported by Bolger, Trost, & Schön (2013). They asked participants to listen to a simple rhythm while performing a simple visual judgment task in which participants are a...

Can rhythm-induced attention improve the perceptual representation?

“…A failure to replicate the specific performance enhancement for the point in time that is in-phase with an isochronous rhythm was recently reported by Bauer et al [49; see also 50], and as described above was also the case with a recent study we performed on isochronous and familiar rhythms [35]. Additionally, no evidence was found for reduced attention blink when the onset of the 'blinked' target matched the rhythm [51], nor did the presentation of a pseudoword near a rhythmic peak improved its later recognition [52]. Furthermore, some studies, which reported a specific rhythm-induced effect, used only one critical IOI-the inphase critical IOI-and compared it to an irregular rhythm [e.g., 9; 27].…”

Beat-based and Memory-based Temporal Expectations in Rhythm: Similar Perceptual Effects, Different Underlying Mechanisms

“…Although the changes in sensory gain suggested by entrainment have often been equated with fluctuations in attention (Large, Herrera, & Velasco, 2015;Henry & Herrmann, 2014;Lakatos et al, 2008), other studies have also shown that entrainment leads to attenuation rather than enhancement of sensory responses (O'Connell et al, 2015;van Atteveldt et al, 2015), like the beat-based expectations in the current study. Moreover, the effects of periodicity, which guides expectations bottom-up, can be dissociated from the effects of task relevance and general top-down attention mechanisms (Kunert & Jongman, 2017). Thus, although entrainment may lead to fluctuations in neural excitability, these may be related to predictions, rather than attention, as proposed by DAT.…”

Beat-based and memory-based temporal expectations in rhythm: similar perceptual effects, different underlying mechanisms

“…While the changes in sensory gain suggested by entrainment have often been equated with fluctuations in attention (Henry & Herrmann, 2014;Lakatos et al, 2008;Large, Herrera, & Velasco, 2015), other studies have also shown that entrainment leads to attenuation rather than enhancement of sensory responses (O'Connel et al, 2015;van Atteveldt et al, 2015), like the beat-based expectations in the current study. Moreover, the effects of periodicity, which guides expectations bottom-up, can be dissociated from the effects of task relevance and general top-down attention mechanisms (Kunert & Jongman, 2017). Thus, while entrainment may lead to fluctuations in neural excitability, these may be related to predictions, rather than attention, as proposed by DAT.…”