Stimulus-aligned brain oscillations can enhance perceived loudness of auditory input
Evidence
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. Such an ‘envelope enhancement’ would have interesting implications for auditory scene analysis problems that benefit from tracking the envelope of the target sound. — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4768
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in auditory scene analysis and envelope tracking; also echoes the ‘envelope enhancement’ concept from psychoacoustic literature on cochlear implants.
- QUESTION: Does tACS phase-entrainment genuinely cause loudness enhancement, or only affect detection thresholds via attention/arousal confounds?
Related
- Electrical brain stimulation may enhance sounds temporally coherent with entrained oscillations (similarity 0.94)
- Phase-coherent brain stimulation may boost perceived loudness of matched click trains (similarity 0.89)
- tACS boosts loudness of click trains temporally coherent with entrained oscillations (similarity 0.85)
- Entrained cortical oscillations modulate perception via phase alignment (similarity 0.85)
- Acoustic and electric stimulus phase alignment is the key experimental variable (similarity 0.85)
- Transcranial alternating current phase modulates auditory click detection at the stimulation frequency (similarity 0.85)
- Stimuli are individually calibrated to near-detection threshold to expose tACS phase effects (similarity 0.84)
- tACS phase benefits to hearing are real but statistically modest (similarity 0.83)
- Auditory detection of near-threshold sounds depends on the phase of ongoing brain oscillations. (similarity 0.83)
- tACS can entrain cortical oscillations while bypassing the peripheral auditory system (similarity 0.82)
- Auditory perception performance varies with the phase of external rhythmic brain stimulation (similarity 0.82)
- tACS phase significantly modulates click detection in normal-hearing listeners (similarity 0.82)
- tACS perceptual benefits so far are modest and often statistically marginal (similarity 0.82)
- Perceptual gains from tACS entrainment are small and often statistically weak (similarity 0.82)
- tACS phase effects generalize from the alpha to the delta and theta oscillation ranges (similarity 0.81)