title: Auditory temporal preparation induced by rhythmic cues during concurrent auditory working memory tasks.
abstract: The present study investigated whether participants can develop temporal preparation driven by auditory isochronous rhythms when concurrently performing an auditory working memory (WM) task. In Experiment 1, participants had to respond to an auditory target presented after a regular or an irregular sequence of auditory stimuli while concurrently performing a Sternberg-type WM task. Results showed that participants responded faster after regular compared with irregular rhythms and that this effect was not affected by WM load; however, the lack of a significant main effect of WM load made it difficult to draw any conclusion regarding the influence of the dual-task manipulation in Experiment 1. In order to enhance dual-task interference, Experiment 2 combined the auditory rhythm procedure with an auditory N-Back task, which required WM updating (monitoring and coding of the information) and was presumably more demanding than the mere rehearsal of the WM task used in Experiment 1. Results now clearly showed dual-task interference effects (slower reaction times [RTs] in the high- vs. the low-load condition). However, such interference did not affect temporal preparation induced by rhythms, with faster RTs after regular than after irregular sequences in the high-load and low-load conditions. These results revealed that secondary tasks demanding memory updating, relative to tasks just demanding rehearsal, produced larger interference effects on overall RTs in the auditory rhythm task. Nevertheless, rhythm regularity exerted a strong temporal preparation effect that survived the interference of the WM task even when both tasks competed for processing resources within the auditory modality.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Psicologia Experimental, Mind, Brain and Behavior Research Center, University of Granada.
authors.forename: Diana
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Cutanda
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Psicologia Experimental, Mind, Brain and Behavior Research Center, University of Granada.
authors.forename: Ángel
authors.initials: Á
authors.lastname: Correa
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Psicologia Experimental, Mind, Brain and Behavior Research Center, University of Granada.
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Sanabria
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D001307:Auditory Perception; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D008875:Middle Aged; D011930:Reaction Time; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult