Citation

Hickok G, Farahbod H, Saberi K. Psychol. Sci. 2015; 26(7): 1006-1013.

Affiliation

Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1177/0956797615576533

PMID

25968248

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.

Language: en