Frequency‐ and phase‐dependent effects of auditory entrainment on attentional blink

Abstract

Attentional blink (AB) is the impaired detection of a second target (T2) after a first target has been identified. In this paper, we investigated the functional roles of alpha and theta oscillations on AB by determining how much preceding rhythmic auditory stimulation affected the performance of AB. Healthy young adults participated in the experiment online. We found that when two targets were embedded in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of distractors at 10 Hz (i.e., alpha frequency), the magnitude of AB increased with auditory stimuli. The increase was limited to the case when the frequency and phase of auditory stimuli matched the following RSVP stream. On the contrary, when only two targets were presented without distractors, auditory stimuli at theta, not alpha, increased the AB magnitude. These results indicate that neural oscillations at two different frequencies, namely, alpha and theta, are involved in attentional blink.

Electrophysiological and Behavioral Effects of Alpha-Band Sensory Entrainment: Neural Mechanisms and Clinical Applications

“…In line with this notion, unisensory visual entrainment administered at alpha frequencies has been widely demonstrated as effective in entraining endogenous alpha oscillations of the cortical and subcortical visual pathways [28,100,101], with associated functional improvements in visual abilities and visual awareness [38,39,42,43,46,58,99]. Moreover, despite a more limited range of available empirical evidence, converging findings have recently also documented the effectiveness of auditory sensory entrainment in entraining the ongoing neuronal oscillations of the visual system, with consequent functional modulation of visual performance [40,41,47]. Indeed, it has been demonstrated that auditory stimuli are capable of inducing a phase reset of the endogenous neuronal oscillations of the visual system, synchronizing oscillatory activity through the functionally interconnected nodes between sensory systems [48,[66][67][68][69][70][71].…”

“…Accordingly, in a subsequent study, Ronconi and colleagues [41] confirmed the efficacy of alpha-band auditory entrainment in reducing the AB magnitude, providing EEG evidence of an association between increased posterior and frontal alpha activity during the rhythmic stream of auditory stimuli and the detection of the visual target. Furthermore, Kawashima and colleagues [47] recently employed an auditory alphaband entrainment (10 Hz) in a web-based modality in order to replicate the findings of Ronconi and colleagues [40,41], increasing the duration of pre-target auditory entrainment (5 s) and showing that auditory rhythmic stimulation worked to increase visual detection performance in an AB task.…”

“…Based on the previously mentioned notion highlighting that oscillatory patterns can be externally modulated, a recent line of research aimed at driving functionally relevant changes in alpha oscillatory activity by directly stimulating the neural oscillating networks, through rhythmic stimulation protocols, exploiting mechanisms of neural plasticity in the visual system [22][23][24][25][26][27]. Indeed, it has been consistently documented that administering a rhythmical external force, such as Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) e.g., [12,[28][29][30], transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation (tACS) e.g., [24,[31][32][33][34][35][36][37] or rhythmic sensory stimulation [15,[38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47], effectively induces a temporal alignment of the endogenous brain oscillations to the external rhythmical event [29,30,[48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57]. Hence, the stimulated neural substrate synchronizes its intrinsic oscillatory activity to the rhythm of the driving oscillatory force [28,…”

“…Alpha-band unisensory (i.e., visual, auditory) and multisensory (i.e., audio-visual) entrainment has been successfully employed in a number of recent experimental investigations and was shown to be effective in inducing modulations in alpha rhythm parameters in functionally interconnected networks, both within and between the visual and the auditory systems [48,[66][67][68][69][70][71], with concurrent improvements in perceptual performance [38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47]58]. Specifically, entrainment protocols are based on the principle that the first stimulus of a rhythmical train of sensory stimuli is capable of inducing a phase reset of the ongoing alpha oscillations in the visual system, synchronizing endogenous oscillatory activity to the rhythm of the external stimulation, with a consequent increase in visual detection when visual stimuli are presented in a phase relative to stimulation frequency ( [38,70]; for a graphical representation of alpha-band sensory entrainment mechanisms, see Figure 1, panel B).…”

Cholinergic‐related pupil activity reflects level of emotionality during motor performance

“…Luminance‐related changes directly modulate the feedforward response of V1 (striate cortex) that is independent of psychological factors like attentional load (Bombeke et al, 2016), suggesting that changes in pupil size due to autonomic regulation also affect visual perception to some degree. Note that while blinks are often considered informative of attentional or other arousal states (Demiral et al, 2023; Kawashima et al, 2022; Schwabe et al, 2011), their effect on pupil size is probably rather related to basic visual function.…”