When the rhythm disappears and the mind keeps dancing: sustained effects of attentional entrainment

Abstract

Research has demonstrated that the human cognitive system allocates attention most efficiently to a stimulus that occurs in synchrony with an established rhythmic background. However, our environment is dynamic and constantly changing. What happens when rhythms to which our cognitive system adapted disappear? We addressed this question using a visual categorization task comprising emotional and neutral faces. The task was split into three blocks of which the first and the last were completed in silence. The second block was accompanied by an acoustic background rhythm that, for one group of participants, was synchronous with face presentations, and for another group was asynchronous. Irrespective of group, performance improved with background stimulation. Importantly, improved performance extended into the third silent block for the synchronous, but not for the asynchronous group. These data suggest that attentional entrainment resulting from rhythmic environmental regularities disintegrates only gradually after the regularities disappear.

What you hear first, is what you get: Initial metrical cue presentation modulates syllable detection in sentence processing

“…One prediction of the DAT is that neural oscillations should persist once the external stimulus has stopped. Evidence for the persistence of neural oscillations after an entrained prime or cue suggests that the brain continues to predict upcoming events, and that a previously entrained stimulus can affect subsequent perception (Canette et al, 2020;Gross et al, 2013;Hickok et al, 2015;Trapp et al, 2018). Of relevance to the current study is that rhythmic cueing studies have shown an influence of rhythmic stimuli on subsequent speech perception (e.g., Cason, Astésano, & Schön, 2015;Cason & Schön, 2012;Falk, Lanzilotti, & Schön, 2017;Gould, McKibben, Ekstrand, Lorentz, & Borowsky, 2015).…”

How to orchestrate a soccer team: Generalized synchronization promoted by rhythmic acoustic stimuli

“…Musical stimuli have an immediate influence on attention and cognitive abilities (Lakatos et al, 2008(Lakatos et al, , 2013, which may result in a kind of attentional entrainment that decays only gradually (Trapp et al, 2018). Importantly, the reaction time in 10.3389/fnhum.2022.909939 a highly demanding visual attention task varies notably when subjects hear the same acoustic stimulus at different tempi (Amezcua et al, 2005;Husain et al, 2002) and may modulate the perception of physical exertion (Martins-Almeida et al, 2015;Patania et al, 2020).…”

“…It was shown that the sensory motor system is involved in selective attention and anticipatory mechanism (Schubotz, 2007;Morillon et al, 2014), which in turn fosters interpersonal coordination because it supports the fine-tuning of self-actions with those of interaction partners (Riess Jones et al, 2006;Keller et al, 2014). Such rhythmic modulation of attention level (Riess Jones et al, 1981;Large and Riess Jones, 1999;Trapp et al, 2018) draws a dynamical picture of attention driven by, e.g., external acoustic stimuli (Escoffier et al, 2010;Bolger et al, 2013). Thus, a preferred tempo of acoustic rhythms improving (motor) cognition (Keller et al, 2014) would provide a strong indication for a resonance-like behavior of brain dynamics (Large, 2008) and affords a plausible explanation of the outcomes of the soccer experiment.…”

A stimulus-brain coupling analysis of regular and irregular rhythms in adults with dyslexia and controls

“…The DAT suggests that the entrainment of neural oscillations to an external, temporally regular stimulus results in attention directed to expected points in time, leading to temporal predictions and facilitated processing for expected events. In support of the DAT, behavioral research has shown that perceptual judgements are facilitated at predictable points in time (suggesting dynamic attending) for auditory (Barnes & Jones, 2000;Jones, Johnston, & Puente, 2006;Large & Jones, 1999;McAuley & Kidd, 1998;Morillon, Schroeder, Wyart, & Arnal, 2016;Sidiras, Iliadou, Nimatoudis, Reichenbach, & Bamiou, 2017) and visual (Bolger, Trost, & Schön, 2013;Escoffier, Sheng, & Schirmer, 2010;Trapp, Havlicek, Schirmer, & Keller, 2018) stimuli. The continuation of rhythmic prediction after the cessation of the external stimulus suggests an internal oscillator that continues to oscillate, rather than groups of neurons firing only to the regularities in the external stimulus (Doelling, Assaneo, Bevilacqua, Pesaran, & Poeppel, 2019).…”