Phase-coherent brain stimulation may boost perceived loudness of matched click trains

Evidence

Experiment 1 revealed that click detection under 4-Hz tACS is modulated by tACS phase: performance was significantly better during one half of the 4-Hz tACS cycle than during the opposite half. … Considering that clicks were presented at the tACS frequency and their detectability was found to depend on tACS phase, a possible interpretation is that tACS essentially enhanced the loudness of those click trains that were temporally coherent (rather than anti-coherent) with tACS-entrained oscillations. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4807

Categorization

• QUESTION: Whether tACS enhances loudness of temporally coherent versus anti-coherent click trains is offered as an interpretation, not settled — worth tracking the experimental confirmation.
• ADDENDUM: The ‘envelope enhancement’ idea — boosting tracking of a target sound’s temporal envelope — parallels the tree-as-infrastructure framing of subtle biological mechanisms as underused infrastructure; both concern making otherwise-implicit structure usable.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4807