The dynamics of attending: How people track time-varying events

A theory of attentional dynamics is proposed and aimed at explaining how listeners respond to systematic change in everyday events while retaining a general sense of their rhythmic structure. The approach describes attending as the behavior of internal oscillations, called attending rhythms, that are capable of entraining to external events and targeting attentional energy to expected points in time. A mathematical formulation of the theory describes internal oscillations that focus pulses of attending energy and interact in various ways to enable attentional tracking of events with complex rhythms. This approach provides reliable predictions about the role of attending to event time structure in rhythmical events that modulate in rate, as demonstrated in 3 listening experiments.