title: The Rhythm of Perception: Entrainment to Acoustic Rhythms Induces Subsequent Perceptual Oscillation.
abstract: Acoustic rhythms are pervasive in speech, music, and environmental sounds. Recent evidence for neural codes representing periodic information suggests that they may be a neural basis for the ability to detect rhythm. Further, rhythmic information has been found to modulate auditory-system excitability, which provides a potential mechanism for parsing the acoustic stream. Here, we explored the effects of a rhythmic stimulus on subsequent auditory perception. We found that a low-frequency (3 Hz), amplitude-modulated signal induces a subsequent oscillation of the perceptual detectability of a brief nonperiodic acoustic stimulus (1-kHz tone); the frequency but not the phase of the perceptual oscillation matches the entrained stimulus-driven rhythmic oscillation. This provides evidence that rhythmic contexts have a direct influence on subsequent auditory perception of discrete acoustic events. Rhythm coding is likely a fundamental feature of auditory-system design that predates the development of explicit human enjoyment of rhythm in music or poetry.
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine greg.hickok@uci.edu.
authors.forename: Gregory
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Hickok
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine.
authors.forename: Haleh
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Farahbod
authors.affiliation: Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine.
authors.forename: Kourosh
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Saberi
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000328:Adult; D001303:Auditory Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D001307:Auditory Perception; D004569:Electroencephalography; D006801:Humans; D009146:Music; D010507:Periodicity; D013067:Speech Perception
keywords: auditory perception; music; neural oscillations; perception; rhythm; speech perception