Journal
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 55, Issue 11-12, Pages 3373-3390Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/ejn.15367
Keywords
auditory perception; brain rhythm; neural oscillations; phase locking; replication
Categories
Funding
- MaxPlanck-Society
Ask authors/readers for more resources
The study revisited the impact of auditory entrainment and found that under certain conditions, entrainment affects auditory detection. However, no significant effects were revealed at the group level, indicating both the sensitivity of the task to oscillatory entrainment and substantial individual variability in performance.
Ample evidence shows that the human brain carefully tracks acoustic temporal regularities in the input, perhaps by entraining cortical neural oscillations to the rate of the stimulation. To what extent the entrained oscillatory activity influences processing of upcoming auditory events remains debated. Here, we revisit a critical finding from Hickok et al. (2015) that demonstrated a clear impact of auditory entrainment on subsequent auditory detection. Participants were asked to detect tones embedded in stationary noise, following a noise that was amplitude modulated at 3 Hz. Tonal targets occurred at various phases relative to the preceding noise modulation. The original study (N = 5) showed that the detectability of the tones (presented at near-threshold intensity) fluctuated cyclically at the same rate as the preceding noise modulation. We conducted an exact replication of the original paradigm (N = 23) and a conceptual replication using a shorter experimental procedure (N = 24). Neither experiment revealed significant entrainment effects at the group level. A restricted analysis on the subset of participants (36%) who did show the entrainment effect revealed no consistent phase alignment between detection facilitation and the preceding rhythmic modulation. Interestingly, both experiments showed group-wide presence of a non-cyclic behavioural pattern, wherein participants' detection of the tonal targets was lower at early and late time points of the target period. The two experiments highlight both the sensitivity of the task to elicit oscillatory entrainment and the striking individual variability in performance.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available