Prediction of Sound Based on Its Rhythmic Oscillation.

The way an individual perceives and predicts sound is closely related to the rhythm of sound itself. This relationship is examined in the Multisite Overview of Oscillation (MOO) project, which extends Hickok et al.’s (2015) discovery of a rhythmic quality to perception–a behavioral reaction to mimic rhythmic sounds. In that study, participants detected the presence or absence of a pure tone amid a background of regularly fluctuating white noise. The target tone could appear at nine different temporal locations relative to the steady fluctuation of the white noise pattern. Their results revealed that participants’ judgments of the presence of tones fluctuated along with the noise, suggesting a form of neural entrainment to this rhythmic noise stimulus. A major limitation of the Hickok et al. (2015) study was its limited sample size of five. Therefore, the MOO project is conducting a large multisite, multi institutional study at labs across the world aimed toward replication of Hickok et al., (2015), with an anticipated sample size of 500. As a participating lab, we collected data from five participants over five sessions of the same task reported by Hickok et al. (2015)–totaling 2250 trials per person at nine different temporal locations relative to the steady fluctuation of the background noise, and five different signal-to-noise ratios. The current study will present the results of our own local analysis while we await the results and analysis from the MOO to be completed. Results will be presented that not only assess whether behavioral evidence for neural entrainment was obtained, but whether we observed individual differences on the basis of hearing ability, musical ability, and self-reported concentration.