Can rhythm-induced attention improve the perceptual representation?

Asaf Elbaz and Yaffa Yeshurun

PLOS ONE, 2020, vol. 15, issue 4, 1-16

Abstract: Temporal attention can be entrained exogenously to rhythms. Indeed, faster and more accurate responses were previously found when the target appeared in-phase with a preceding rhythm in comparison to when it was out of phase. However, the nature of this rhythm-induced attentional effect is not well understood. To better understand the processes underlying rhythm-induced attention, we employed a continuous measure of perceived orientation and a mixture-model analysis. A trial in our study started with a sequence of auditory beeps separated by a fixed inter-beeps interval in the regular (rhythmic) condition or by variable inter-beeps intervals in the irregular condition. A visual target–a line embedded in a circle–followed the sequence. The ‘critical’ interval between the last beep and the target was chosen randomly from several possible Inter-Onset Intervals (IOIs), of which only one was in-phase with the rhythm. The target was followed by a probe line, and the participants were asked to rotate it to reproduce the target’s orientation. The measure of performance for a given trial was the difference in degrees between the orientation of the target and that reproduced by the observer. We found that guessing rate was lower with regular than irregular rhythms. However, there was no effect of rhythm type (regular vs irregular) on the quality of representation (measured as the variability in reproducing the target). Furthermore, the rhythm effect was present only when rhythm type was fixed within a block, and it was found with all IOIs, not just the in-phase IOI. This lack of specificity suggests that these results reflect a general effect of rhythm on alertness.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0231200 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 31200&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0231200

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0231200

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().