PONE-D-19-19264

Can rhythm-induced attention improve the perceptual representation?

PLOS ONE

Dear Elbaz,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration by three reviewers, we feel that it has substantial merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. In general, the comments seem quite addressable. Two reviewers felt some additional referencing and context would be useful in the introduction--I will leave it to your discretion to decide whether all of the suggested papers are relevant and merit inclusion.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors use a visual orientation task to test the role of temporal expectancies induced by a preceding rhythmic context. They also use a modelling technique to separate the contributions of guessing from the precision of the internal mental representation. In three experiments, the authors find no evidence for an enhancement for stimuli that conform to temporal expectancies. Instead, they report a more general effect of decreased guessing in a rhythmic (as opposed to irregular) context – regardless of the timing of the target stimulus. I think this paper is a useful contribution to our understanding of temporal perception, particularly through using a different methodology which provides findings that converge with recent replication failures of temporal expectation profiles. However, I also think that the contribution of the paper could be improved by relating to more of the relevant literature. The Bauer et al. (2015) paper is a good start, but there are many more papers that directly speak to this issue (e.g., Barnes & Johnston, 2010; Bermeitinger & Frings, 2015; Hickok, Farahbod, & Saberi, 2015; Kunert & Jongman, 2017; Miller, Carlson, & McAuley, 2013; Morillon, Schroeder, & Wyart, 2014; Morillon, Schroeder, Wyart, & Arnal, 2016; Prince & Sopp, 2019) in addition to a helpful review (Haegens & Zion Golumbic, 2018). It also would be good form to point the reader to the seminal papers on Dynamic Attending Theory (e.g., Jones, 1976; Jones & Boltz, 1989; Large & Jones, 1999) rather than only the 2002 article. I encourage the authors to explore this literature and incorporate material they find relevant. Otherwise I only have minor comments as detailed below.

Abstract: specify participant N for each experiment.

Line 70: “the two tasks” – did you mean “the two task types”?

Line 82: APA nitpick – “while” and “since” are temporal terms, not conjunctions

Line 94: could you clarify what exactly you mean by the height of the distribution? How is this measured? Are there standard units you could refer to? I found this measure harder to grasp than the width (given that you specified it as SD).

Line 130: “data was” – should be “were”. Also, I’m a little uncomfortable with excluding data based on model convergence failure. Is there a more empirical performance-based measure that you can use to exclude data? Same issue for Experiment 3.

Line 173: delete “a” at end of line

Line 223: this is quite a different IOI than Experiment 1, and much closer to the average spontaneous tapping rate (thus potentially making entrainment easier). Might be worth adding some justification of this design choice.

Line 396: “examined” – should be present tense

References:

Barnes, R., & Johnston, H. (2010). The role of timing deviations and target position uncertainty on temporal attending in a serial auditory pitch discrimination task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63, 341-355. doi: 10.1080/17470210902925312

Bauer, A.-K.R., Jaeger, M., Thorne, J.D., Bendixen, A., & Debener, S. (2015). The auditory dynamic attending theory revisited: A closer look at the pitch comparison task. Brain Research, 1626, 198-210. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2015.04.032

Bermeitinger, C., & Frings, C. (2015). Rhythm and attention: Does the beat position of a visual or auditory regular pulse modulate t2 detection in the attentional blink? Frontiers in Psychology, 6. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01847

Haegens, S., & Zion Golumbic, E. (2018). Rhythmic facilitation of sensory processing: A critical review. Neurosci Biobehav Rev, 86, 150-165. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2017.12.002

Hickok, G., Farahbod, H., & Saberi, K. (2015). The rhythm of perception: Entrainment to acoustic rhythms induces subsequent perceptual oscillation. Psychological Science, 26, 1006-1013. doi: doi:10.1177/0956797615576533

Jones, M.R. (1976). Time, our lost dimension - toward a new theory of perception, attention, and memory. Psychological Review, 83, 323-355. doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.83.5.323

Jones, M.R., & Boltz, M.G. (1989). Dynamic attending and responses to time. Psychological Review, 96, 459-491. doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.96.3.459

Kunert, R., & Jongman, S.R. (2017). Entrainment to an auditory signal: Is attention involved? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 146, 77-88. doi: 10.1037/xge0000246

Large, E.W., & Jones, M.R. (1999). The dynamics of attending: How people track time-varying events. Psychological Review, 106, 119-159. doi: 10.1037/0033-295X.106.1.119

Miller, J.E., Carlson, L.A., & McAuley, J.D. (2013). When what you hear influences when you see: Listening to an auditory rhythm influences the temporal allocation of visual attention. Psychological Science, 24, 11-18. doi: 10.1177/0956797612446707

Morillon, B., Schroeder, C.E., & Wyart, V. (2014). Motor contributions to the temporal precision of auditory attention. Nature Communications, 5, 5255. doi: 10.1038/ncomms6255

Morillon, B., Schroeder, C.E., Wyart, V., & Arnal, L.H. (2016). Temporal prediction in lieu of periodic stimulation. Journal of Neuroscience, 36, 2342-2347. doi: 10.1523/jneurosci.0836-15.2016

Prince, J.B., & Sopp, M. (2019). Temporal expectancies affect accuracy in standard-comparison judgements of duration, but neither pitch height, nor timbre, nor loudness. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 45, 585-600. doi: 10.1037/xhp0000629

Reviewer #2: In this study, the authors investigated whether entrainment to rhythms can modulate the quality of sensory representation. This is a nicely written paper with interesting results. I do not have any comments on the proposed experiments or analysis.

However, I believe it is important for authors to complement their discussion with the following points:

1) Can the task be influencing the results? As authors point out, the majority of results in entrainment use simple tasks, such as detection or discrimination tasks. Possibly, in the task authors used, the effect of entrainment can be smaller or even inexistent.

2) Whether the task can be too hard or too easy. The pattern of results suggests that participants are performing the task very well, with SD around 13 degrees. Could that be a possible reason for the lack of effects?

Reviewer #3: The current study investigated in three behavioural experiments, the influence of auditory rhythmic stimulation on visual perception. In all three experiments the authors compared the influence of a regular/irregular auditory sequence on visual target performance. While a blocked design employed in experiment 2 and 3 enhanced performance for rhythmic sequences, none of the three studies found an effect of in-phase target presentation.

Overall the methods are sound and the manuscript is well written. However, every so often there is a bit of clarification needed. Further, sometimes the motivation for the chosen parameters is not clear. Comments and suggestions are roughly listed in order of appearance within the manuscript

Major comments:

The introduction mainly focuses on attentional or neural entrainment studies in uni-modal, either auditory or visual, contexts. However, the task used in the current study is essentially a cross-modal task. It would be good to have some explicit motivation in the introduction for why an auditory rhythm should have an influence on visual target perception and in this study on visual working memory. Further, there are a few papers on cross-modal rhythms, which could be mentioned in the introduction, such as:

Miller et al., 2013: When What You Hear Influences When You See: Listening to an Auditory Rhythm Influences the Temporal Allocation of Visual Attention. Psychological Science, 24, 11-18.

Escoffier, N. et al. (2015) Auditory rhythms entrain visual processes in the human brain: Evidence from evoked oscillations and event-related potentials. Neuroimage 111, 267–276.

Barnhart, A.S. et al. (2018) Cross-modal attentional entrainment: Insights from magicians. Attention, Perception, Psychophysics. 80, 1240–1249.

p. 9, line 198ff: “Perhaps these results are due to the mixed design employed here”. This sentence is not entirely clear. First, the term mixed is a bit confounded with the mixed model used by the authors. Second, it is not mentioned in the procedure section of experiment 1 that the rhythmic and irregular trials were not presented in blocks and should be added. Further, it is not clear whether rhythmic and irregular trials were presented interleaved or whether they were randomly chosen within each block. If the latter is true, the analysis could be potentially redone on trials that were preceded by rhythmic/irregular trials (if 2 or more rhythmic trials were presented in a row), which could substantiate the claim of the authors that the results are due to the “mixed” design.

p. 11, line 255: “Instead, we found that the regular rhythm improved the quality of representation of the out of phase targets, but not that of the in-phase targets”. The authors admit that this result is a bit puzzling given the premise of attentional entrainment. As a possible explanation the authors suggest temporal expectation. First, the reasoning of their explanation is not entirely clear and should be spelled out more clearly. Second, another possible explanation might be that participants ignore input that is currently irrelevant (the rhythmic sequence) and focus solely on the critical IOIs. In that case the in-phase targets might be worse than the out of phase targets. See also:

Devergie, A., et al. (2010). Effect of rhythmic attention on the segregation of interleaved

melodies. J.Acoust.Soc.Am.128(1), EL1–EL7.

Rimmele, J., et al. (2012). Age-related changes in the use of regular patterns for auditory scene analysis. Hear.Res.289(1-2),98–107.

General discussion: as with the introduction it would be desirable that the authors discuss the results within a cross-modal context. It might be that the lack of in-phase behavioural enhancement is due to the fact that an auditory rhythm might not necessarily enhance visual perceptual performance per se.

Minor comments:

p. 7, Procedure: What were the instructions for the participants (also for experiment 2 and 3)? Were the participants instructed to pay attention to the auditory streams and thus focus on the rhythmicity or were they instructed to focus on the visual task? Manipulating the attention to either the auditory or visual modality might have an impact on the results at hand.

p. 7, line 144: which type of headphones were used?

p. 7, line 147: “(1°)”. Can the authors clarify that they mean 1° of visual angle?

p. 7, line 158: “…by a fixed IOI of 450ms.” Was there are specific reason for using 450ms? Previous studies mainly used 500ms or 600ms (Jones et al., 2002; Bauer et al., 2015; Miller et al., 2013).

p. 8, line 168: “…540 trials of which 20% were catch trials…”. It would be desirable to have the trial numbers for each critical IOI spelled out in the text. The same is true for experiment 2 and 3.

p. 9, line 215: “A total of 18 students…”. Can the authors clarify why they choose a smaller sample size as compared to experiment 1?

p. 9, line 223: “a fixed 650ms IOI”. Can the authors please clarify why they chose a different IOI and critical IOIs as compared to experiment 1? Makes it harder to compare the results from both studies.

p. 12, Procedure: it is worth mentioning in the procedure section that the trials were again presented in blocks.

p. 12, line 289: Can the authors please clarify why they chose the specific IOIs. It is not clear to me why the critical IOIs are not symmetric around the in-phase critical IOI and why the authors choose such a long critical IOI (2050ms) that is more than 2 attentional cycles from the critical IOI. What were the expectations of the authors by chosing those IOIs?

p. 13: comment: the difference in interaction results for experiment 2 and 3 might be driven by the large critical IOI of 2050ms as this IOI has a large hazard rate.

Fig. 2 irregular rhythm 250ms misses one y-axis number (0.25)

Fig. 4: it would be good if all subfigures are on the same scale (in particular the regular rhythm panels)

Fig 5: adjust the x-axis values to match the critical IOIs.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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PONE-D-19-19264R1

Can rhythm-induced attention improve the perceptual representation?

PLOS ONE

Dear Elbaz,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. The reviewers felt that most of their comments were addressed, and the remaining comments are all fairly minor.

We would appreciate receiving your revised manuscript by Apr 24 2020 11:59PM. When you are ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter.

To enhance the reproducibility of your results, we recommend that if applicable you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io, where a protocol can be assigned its own identifier (DOI) such that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). This letter should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. This file should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. This file should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Manuscript'.

Please note while forming your response, if your article is accepted, you may have the opportunity to make the peer review history publicly available. The record will include editor decision letters (with reviews) and your responses to reviewer comments. If eligible, we will contact you to opt in or out.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Jessica Adrienne Grahn

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

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Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: I’m happy with the revisions to the paper. I have a few minor typographical/formatting comments below.

line 143: “due to a too noisy data” – remove “a”

line 144: “analyses are conducted we had” – add a comma after “conducted”

line 176: “50m” – presumably this should be “50ms”

line 186: “trials with which” – replace “with” with “in”

line 216: “with which rhythm type” – replace “with” with “in”

page 11: be consistent with significant digits used to report p values

line 270: follow APA format for reporting F-scores below 1

line 455: “De la Rosa et al. [53] study” – add “The” before “De la Rosa”

Reference section: a number of minor APA formatting issues here, presumably these will be addressed at the copy-editing stage

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

Reviewer #3: This is the first revision of a previously submitted manuscript. I have only a few minor remarks.

p. 3, line 57 ff: “Based on such rhythm effects, the dynamic attending theory (DAT) suggests that entrainment to a rhythm reflects external rhythms driving internal oscillators leading to a narrower attentional focus with regular (isochronous) rhythms than with irregular (asynchronous) rhythms.” This sentence is somewhat confusing and would benefit from rewriting.

p. 6, line 117 ff: “For example, Miller, Carlson, and McAuley [26] have found that an auditory rhythm reduced saccade latency to a visual target and increased discrimination accuracy when target onset was in-phase with the rhythm.” Maybe rephrase to “in-phase with the preceding auditory rhythm”. In addition, it might be good to split the sentences into two sentences and mention more specifically that the visual target could occur either in-phase or out-phase.

p. 18, line 432: “Still, such attentional effects may be less robust under cross-modal setting.” It is not entirely clear what the authors would like to say with this sentence.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files to be viewed.]

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Can rhythm-induced attention improve the perceptual representation?

PONE-D-19-19264R2

Dear Dr. Elbaz,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it complies with all outstanding technical requirements.

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