Auditory perception performance varies with the phase of external rhythmic brain stimulation

Evidence

Cortical oscillations may also entrain with periodic auditory stimuli, so that high neuronal excitability phases become aligned with peaks in the sound envelope. This sound-brain entrainment is thought to facilitate cortical processing of upcoming acoustic events that concur with sound envelope peaks (Schroeder and Lakatos 2009 ; Arnal and Giraud 2012 ). While correlational studies showed that sound-brain entrainment is involved in the neural processing and perception of auditory stimuli (Stefanics et al. 2010 ; Besle et al. 2011 ; Gomez-Ramirez et al. 2011 ), only three published human studies sought to directly control this entrainment with periodic external stimulation and assess the perceptual effects. Neuling et al. ( 2012 ) presented tone pips in noise and simultaneously applied 10-Hz tACS above the auditory cortices while manipulating the relative timing of the tone and tACS (the phase lag). They found that detection performance varied as a function of phase lag and that this function resembled well the tACS waveform. Henry ( 2012 ; Henry et al. 2014 ) used a periodic 3- or 5-Hz modulation applied to an interrupted tone carrier as entraining stimulus. They manipulated the relative timing of the gap and the ongoing modulation and found that this influences gap detection in the phase-dependent manner described above for the tACS study. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4773

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to sound-brain entrainment literature (Schroeder & Lakatos) and to how neural oscillations align with stimulus envelopes - relevant to the reader’s interest in psychoacoustics and cognition chapters.