Oscillatory Attention in Groove

Attention is not constant but rather fluctuates over time. In order to efficiently parse the world around us, these attentional fluctuations must be temporally realigned to prioritize the processing of certain events over others. The pleasurable urge to move to music (termed ‘groove’ by music psychologists) offers a particularly convenient case study because it engenders synchronous movements and varies predictably with stimulus complexity along an inverted U-shaped curve. In this study, we recorded pupillometry and scalp electroencephalography (EEG) from participants while they listened to drumbeats of varying complexity that they rated in terms of groove. Using the intertrial phase coherence of the beat frequency, we found that pupil dilations became entrained to the beat of the drumbeats while subjects were listening and this entrained attention persisted in the EEG as subjects imagined the drumbeats continuing through subsequent silence periods at the end of each trial. This entrainment in both the pupillometry and EEG worsened with increasing rhythmic complexity, indicating poorer sensory precision as the beat became more obscured. Additionally, evoked pupil dilations tracked the inverted U-shaped relationship between rhythmic complexity and groove ratings. Taken together, this work bridges oscillatory attention to rhythmic complexity and their aesthetic appraisals.