Brain & Mind Institute

How we measure time and integrate temporal cues from different sensory modalities are fundamental questions in neuroscience. Sensitivity to a “beat” (such as that routinely perceived in music) differs substantially between auditory and visual modalities. Here we examined beat sensitivity in each modality, and examined cross-modal influences, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to characterize brain activity during perception of auditory and visual rhythms. In separate fMRI sessions, participants listened to auditory sequences or watched visual sequences. The order of auditory and visual sequence presentation was counterbalanced so that cross-modal order effects could be investigated. Participants judged whether sequences were speeding up or slowing down, and the pattern of tempo judgments was used to derive a measure of sensitivity to an implied beat. As expected, participants were less sensitive to an implied beat in visual sequences than in auditory sequences. However, visual sequences produced a stronger sense of beat when preceded by auditory sequences with identical temporal structure. Moreover, increases in brain activity were observed in the bilateral putamen for visual sequences preceded by auditory sequences when compared to visual sequences without prior auditory exposure. No such order-dependent differences (behavioral or neural) were found for the auditory sequences. The results provide further evidence for the role of the basal ganglia in internal generation of the beat and suggest that an internal auditory rhythm representation may be activated during visual rhythm perception.

‘Brain training’, or the quest for improved cognitive function through the regular use of computerised tests, is a multimillion pound industry1, yet scientific evidence to support its efficacy is lacking. Modest effects have been reported in some studies of older individuals2,3 and preschool children4, and video gamers out perform non-gamers on some tests of visual attention5. However, the widely held belief that commercially available computerised brain trainers improve general cognitive function in the wider population lacks empirical support. The central question is not whether performance on cognitive tests can be improved by training, but rather, whether those benefits transfer to other untrained tasks or lead to any general improvement in the level of cognitive functioning. Here we report the results of a six-week online study in which 11,430 participants trained several times each week on cognitive tasks designed to improve reasoning, memory, planning, visuospatial skills and attention. Although improvements were observed in every one of the cognitive tasks that were trained, no evidence was found for transfer effects to untrained tasks, even when those tasks were cognitively closely related.

Humans often synchronize movements to the beat, indicating that motor areas may be involved in detecting or generating a beat. The basal ganglia have been shown to be preferentially activated by perception of rhythms with a regular beat , but their necessity for beat-based rhythm processing has not been proven. Previous research has shown that Parkinson's disease (PD) patients are impaired in timing of isochronous intervals , but little work has tested more complex rhythms. In healthy volunteers, behavioural performance is better for rhythms with a beat than without a beat (Essens, 1986). We tested PD patients and controls on a rhythm discrimination task to determine if basal ganglia dysfunction results in an impairment of processing rhythms that have a beat. Unlike rhythm reproduction, discrimination has no motor requirements that are problematic for patients. Half the rhythms had a beat-based structure, and half did not. Subjects heard a rhythm twice and then indicated if a third presentation of the rhythm was the same or different. We predicted that PD patients would benefit less from beat structure than controls, resulting in a group by rhythm-type interaction, with reduced relative performance for the beat-based sequences in the PD group. Indeed this was the pattern of the results. In the control group, a significant advantage was observed for discrimination of rhythms with a beat compared to those without a beat. This advantage was greatly reduced in the PD group. Discrimination of beat-based rhythms was significantly impaired in PD patients compared to controls, whereas discrimination of non-beat-based rhythms did not differ significantly.

Our perception of time is affected by the modality in which it is conveyed. Moreover, certain temporal phenomena appear to exist in only one modality. The perception of temporal regularity or structure (e.g., the 'beat') in rhythmic patterns is one such phenomenon: visual beat perception is rare. The modality-specificity for beat perception is puzzling, as the durations that comprise rhythmic patterns are much longer than the limits of visual temporal resolution. Moreover, the optimization that beat perception provides for memory of auditory sequences should be equally relevant to visual sequences. Why does beat perception appear to be modality specific? One possibility is that the nature of the visual stimulus plays a role. Previous studies have usually used brief stimuli (e.g., light flashes) to present visual rhythms. In the current study, a rotating line that appeared sequentially in different spatial orientations was used to present a visual rhythm. Discrimination accuracy for visual rhythms and auditory rhythms was compared for different types of rhythms. The rhythms either had a regular temporal structure that previously has been shown to induce beat perception in the auditory modality, or they had an irregular temporal structure without beat-inducing qualities. Overall, the visual rhythms were discriminated more poorly than the auditory rhythms. The beat-based structure, however, increased accuracy for visual as well as auditory rhythms. These results indicate that beat perception can occur in the visual modality and improve performance on a temporal discrimination task, when certain types of stimuli are used.

At one level ''sustained attention'' is simply a description of a task demand. It is often used, however, in reference to a putatively unitary capacity to remain engaged in tasks that are lengthy, dull, repetitive and/or characterised by long intervals between relevant events. Deficits in sustained attention have been reported in a range of clinical conditions. Despite this, there is paucity of well-controlled human functional imaging evidence about regions commonly recruited during diverse sustained attention tasks. Here, for the first time, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor brain activity patterns as healthy volunteers performed two sustained attention tasks. The first, widely used in clinical assessment, required participants to count tones separated by long unpredictable intervals. This was contrasted with a control counting condition in which tones were presented at a brisk, regular rate. The second task was the Sustained Attention to Response Test (SART) in which participants responded to sequentially presented digits with the exception of a nominated infrequent no-go target. In the control condition, no-go trials were explicitly absent, removing the requirement to maintain a readiness to withhold responses. Although there were distinct patterns of activation associated with each task relative to its control, activity common to both tasks was found in the bilateral inferior frontal operculum, anterior cingulate, and bilateral premotor cortex. Although some researchers argue for a specific role of the inferior frontal operculum in inhibition, our results are consistent with recent findings of a more general attentional role for this area. The maintenance of a goal directed stance in the absence of strong environmental facilitation is challenging and this may underpin the sensitivity of sustained attention tasks to functional difficulties in a range of clinical groups.

Prestimulus activity in visual extinction affects perception.The BOLD signal in two visual areas is indicative of perception in bilateral trials.Intrinsic and extrinsic connectivity is elevated prior to perceived trials.Patients with visual extinction following right-hemisphere damage sometimes see and sometimes miss stimuli in the left visual field, particularly when stimuli are presented simultaneously to both visual fields. Awareness of left visual field stimuli is associated with increased activity in bilateral parietal and frontal cortex. However, it is unknown why patients see or miss these stimuli. Previous neuroimaging studies in healthy adults show that prestimulus activity biases perceptual decisions, and biases in visual perception can be attributed to fluctuations in prestimulus activity in task relevant brain regions. Here, we used functional MRI to investigate whether prestimulus activity affected perception in the context of visual extinction following stroke. We measured prestimulus activity in stimulus-responsive cortical areas during an extinction paradigm in a patient with unilateral right parietal damage and visual extinction. This allowed us to compare prestimulus activity on physically identical bilateral trials that either did or did not lead to visual extinction. We found significantly increased activity prior to stimulus presentation in two areas that were also activated by visual stimulation: the left calcarine sulcus and right occipital inferior cortex. Using dynamic causal modelling (DCM) we found that both these differences in prestimulus activity and stimulus evoked responses could be explained by enhanced effective connectivity within and between visual areas, prior to stimulus presentation. Thus, we provide evidence for the idea that differences in ongoing neural activity in visually responsive areas prior to stimulus onset affect awareness in visual extinction, and that these differences are mediated by fluctuations in extrinsic and intrinsic connectivity.

Parkinson's disease (PD) adversely affects timing abilities. Beat-based timing is a mechanism that times events relative to a regular interval, such as the " beat " in musical rhythm, and is impaired in PD. It is unknown if dopaminergic medication influences beat-based timing in PD. Here, we tested beat-based timing over two sessions in participants with PD (OFF then ON dopaminergic medication) and in unmedicated control participants. People with PD and control participants completed two tasks. The first was a discrimination task in which participants compared two rhythms and determined whether they were the same or different. Rhythms either had a beat structure (metric simple rhythms) or did not (metric complex rhythms), as in previous studies. Discrimination accuracy was analyzed to test for the effects of beat structure, as well as differences between participants with PD and controls, and effects of medication (PD group only). The second task was the Beat Alignment Test (BAT), in which participants listened to music with regular tones superimposed, and responded as to whether the tones were " ON " or " OFF " the beat of the music. Accuracy was analyzed to test for differences between participants with PD and controls, and for an effect of medication in patients. Both patients and controls discriminated metric simple rhythms better than metric complex rhythms. Controls also improved at the discrimination task in the second vs. first session, whereas people with PD did not. For participants with PD, the difference in performance between metric simple and metric complex rhythms was greater (sensitivity to changes in simple rhythms increased and sensitivity to changes in complex rhythms decreased) when ON vs. OFF medication. Performance also worsened with disease severity. For the BAT, no group differences or effects of medication were found. Overall, these findings suggest that timing is impaired in PD, and that dopaminergic medication influences beat-based and non-beat-based timing differently. Judging the beat in music does not appear to be affected by PD or by dopaminergic medication.

The ability to entrain movements to music is arguably universal, but it is unclear how specialized training may influence this. Previous research suggests that percussionists have superior temporal precision in perception and production tasks. Such superiority may be limited to temporal sequences that resemble real music or, alternatively, may generalize to musically implausible sequences. To test this, percussionists and nonpercussionists completed two tasks that used rhythmic sequences varying in musical plausibility. In the beat tapping task, participants tapped with the beat of a rhythmic sequence over 3 stages: finding the beat (as an initial sequence played), continuation of the beat (as a second sequence was introduced and played simultaneously), and switching to a second beat (the initial sequence finished, leaving only the second). The meters of the two sequences were either congruent or incongruent, as were their tempi (minimum inter-onset intervals). In the rhythm reproduction task, participants reproduced rhythms of four types, ranging from high to low musical plausibility: Metric simple rhythms induced a strong sense of the beat, metric complex rhythms induced a weaker sense of the beat, nonmetric rhythms had no beat, and jittered nonmetric rhythms also had no beat as well as low temporal predictability. For both tasks, percussionists performed more accurately than nonpercussionists. In addition, both groups were better with musically plausible than implausible conditions. Overall, the percussionists' superior abilities to entrain to, and reproduce, rhythms generalized to musically implausible sequences.