Attention modulates neural measures associated with beat perception

A growing body of evidence suggests that steady-state evoked potentials may be a useful measure of beat perception, particularly when obtaining traditional, explicit measures of beat perception is difficult, such as with infants or non-human animals. Although attending to a stimulus is not necessary for most traditional applications of steady-state evoked potentials, it is unknown how attention affects steady-state evoked potentials that arise in response to beat perception. Additionally, most applications of steady-state evoked potentials to measure beat perception have used repeating rhythms or real music. Therefore, it is unclear how the steady-state response relates to the robust beat perception that occurs with non-repeating rhythms. Here, we used electroencephalography to record participants' brain activity as they listened to non-repeating musical rhythms while either attending to the rhythms or while distracted by a concurrent visual task. Non-repeating auditory rhythms elicited steady-state evoked potentials at perceived beat frequencies (perception was validated in a separate sensorimotor synchronization task) that were larger when participants attended to the rhythms compared with when they were distracted by the visual task. Therefore, although steady-state evoked potentials appear to index beat perception to non-repeating musical rhythms, this technique may be limited to when participants are known to be attending to the stimulus.