Rhythms are everywhere – we encounter them in our environment and produce them through movement, speech, and sensory activity. In both cognitive and clinical settings, externally imposed rhythms can improve performance by providing temporal regularities that guide attention and behavior. In this study, we aimed to understand the impact of external and internal rhythms on visual performance in a cross-modal task devoid of rhythmic temporal structure.
We thus investigated the differential impact of auditory beats (1-, 2-, 5-Hz, or no beat) on visual detection in a non-rhythmic, dynamic search task requiring the continuous deployment of attention. We additionally assessed whether the influence of auditory beats on detection was modulated by individuals’ rhythmic preferences as measured by their spontaneous motor tempo. Overall, we found that auditory rhythms enhanced visual task performance, even in the absence of rhythmic structure within the measured task, improving both detection accuracy and response speed.
This enhancement was tempo-dependent, with the strongest facilitation observed at 2 Hz. The magnitude of the observed benefits varied with individuals’ spontaneous motor tempo, such that participants with slower SMTs exhibited the greatest performance benefits due to the presence of auditory rhythms. We propose that rhythmic stimulation may serve as a powerful scaffold for sustained performance in the context of dynamic and temporally unpredictable environments.
We thank Hillel Gottesmann for help with auditory stimuli development and for providing insightful remarks on previous drafts of this manuscript. Landau is funded by the European Research Council Starting Grant (grant number: 852387) as well as the Product Academy Award. Nir Shalev is funded by the Israeli Science Foundation Research Grant (grant number: 1073/24).
Talya Shlesinger-Arad is funded by the Jerusalem Brain Community. Talya Shlesinger-Arad and Flor Kusnir contributed equally to this manuscript. Departments of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel Talya Shlesinger-Arad, Flor Kusnir, Leah Snapiri & Ayelet N.
Landau Department of Gerontology & The Institute of Information Processing and Decision Making, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, London, UK The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
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