Neural Entrainment to Musical Rhythm and Facilitation of Memory Encoding
Hickey, Paige.
2019
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Thesis (M.S.)--Tufts University, 2019.
Submitted to the Dept. of Psychology.
Advisor: Elizabeth Race.
Committee: Aniruddh Patel, and Molly Henry.
Keyword: Psychology.
Temporal regularities in the environment, such as regular auditory rhythms, can facilitate the encoding of visual information that appears at temporally-predicted moments in time (i.e., in ... read moresynchrony with the beat). The current study investigated the neural mechanisms underlying this rhythmic facilitation of memory (Study 1) and whether rhythm impacts the formation of associative memories (memory for items and locations) in addition to facilitating memory for individual items (Study 2). In Study 1, we found that low-frequency cortical oscillations synchronize to auditory rhythms present in instrumental music and that the magnitude of this synchronization correlates with the magnitude of rhythmic effects on visual long-term memory (superior memory for on-beat compared to off-beat stimuli) across individuals. In addition, the phase of entrained oscillations at the beat frequency differed for on-beat compared to off-beat trials within subjects. In study 2, background musical rhythm facilitated response times to targets appearing in-synchrony compared to out-of-synchrony with the beat, but did not affect item or associative memory. Taken together, the results of the current studies provide novel evidence linking neural and behavioral responses to rhythm, and suggest that the rhythmic facilitation of memory may be sensitive to the nature of the task demands or properties of the to-be-encoded stimuli.read less - ID:
- mc87q492b
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