Auditory Rhythms

(Miller, Carlson, & McCauley 2013) experimented on the effects auditory rhythms could have on the allocation of visual attention. The human body follows an internal clock or a circadian rhythm unconsciously and Miller, Carlson and McCauley (2013) tested if the internal clock could be entrained or synchronized with an asynchronous (single repetitive) tone while responding to stimuli on a computer screen. The first of three experiments examined how auditory entrainment or auditory synching affected visual attention (Miller et al., 2013). As tones were being played, participants made a saccade, or a quick eye movement, from a central fixation point to a test dot that would appear on a computer screen at end of an auditory rhythm sequence of
Meaning, the dot appeared either in synch with the auditory rhythm or a couple milliseconds late. They did this to see if hearing their internal clock would entrain with the tones and therefore create expectancy to when and where the dot would appear on the screen. In the second experiment, Miller, Carlson and McCauley (2013) eliminated the final tone of the auditory sequence presented in Experiment 1 while still presenting the same task. In other words, instead of being presented with ten tones and then a dot, participants were presented with nine tones, another 600 milliseconds of silence and then the dot. The one addition made was that there was a second auditory sequence where the amount of white noise or space varied in-between the nine tones presented (Miller et al., 2013). They did this to see if participants were still entrained to the tones even when the final tone was eliminated and there for could anticipate when the dot would appear as easily as in Experiment 1. For Experiment 3, they kept the element of the missing tone of Experiment 2, but made the sequence shorter (seven tones instead of nine). They did keep only the one sequence of tones that were separated by 600 milliseconds
We also talked about saccadic movement as being a way that our eyes perceive movement of stationary objects. Both rhythm and saccadic movements are covered in the article as part of attention entrainment in a way that the rhythms that we hear have an influence to where we look or divert our attention to. When we make a saccade, we quickly shift our visual attention from one point to another and when you combine it with an auditory cue, that attention is synchronized with the cue as an expected effect (Miller et al., 2013). During experiment 2 and 3 (Miller et al., 2013) the idea of syncopation was seen, even if the auditory cues were not distorted in terms of pitch in-between tones, the experimenters did eliminate the final tone of the sequence and also change the distance of milliseconds in between tones and therefore create the distortion during the rhythm. We have seen that our visual field sees things very clearly when looking directly at a fixed object since our attention is focused on that one point. The same can be said about our auditory system, which allows us to be able to process information in the dimension of time and therefore follow rhythms in music and in the case of the article follow a single repeating rhythm throughout. Something else that the book talks about is “spotlight theory”. This theory talks about how our