Confirming an antiphasic bicyclic pattern of forward entrainment in signal detection: A reanalysis of Sun et al. (2021)

Abstract

as well as Monte Carlo simulations. There are 7 primary figures and 4 supplemental figures. DATA FILES:The data file from Sun et al., named "sundata.mat" contains 41400 rows by 8 columns. This data file has been cropped to include only those columns relevant to the current analysis. Each subject's data is contained in 1800 rows (1800x23=41400).

Forward entrainment: Psychophysics, neural correlates, and function

“…See text for details Hickok, 2021). Similar intersubject variability has also been reported by Jones et al (2002), Lawrence et al (2014), Bauer et al (2015, and Sun et al (2021), where a proportion of their subjects show forward entrainment and a proportion do not under the same experimental conditions (see also Saberi & Hickok, 2022a). These proportions vary widely across studies.…”

“…Subject-specific phase dependency has been reported for simultaneous entrainment (Henry & Obleser 2012), and a phase drift in the dips and peaks of performance has been reported by Farahbod et al (2020) in a forward entrainment task as a function of the entraining modulation rate. Variable starting-phase effects have also been reported by Sun et al (2021) for a proportion (35%) of their subjects who showed forward entrainment (see also a critique of Sun et al's findings by Saberi & Hickok, 2022a).…”

“…This antiphasic pattern, coupled with findings on signal uncertainty (Farahbod et al, 2020) suggests that forward entrainment may be largely attention driven (even if implicitly so) rather than by a bottom-up neurophysiological mechanism. Findings from Hickok et al (2015) have been supported by studies using nearly identical stimuli both psychophysically (Farahbod et al, 2020;Forseth et al, 2020;Henry et al, 2022;Saberi & Hickok, 2022a) and neurophysiologically (Forseth et al, 2020;Simon & Wallace, 2017).…”

“…We suggest that another potential explanation is that perhaps intelligible words simply activate implicit attentional networks more strongly than unintelligible words, and as Lakatos et al (2013) have demonstrated, neural forward entrainment in the monkey auditory cortex requires attention and disappears when the animal is inattentive (see section on Neurophysiological findings in forward entrainment). Farahbod et al (2020) and Saberi and Hickok (2022a) have also argued for a critical role of attentional capture in forward entrainment.…”

Informational Masking in Aging and Brain-lesioned Individuals

“…More recent studies have investigated how the informational content of masking sequences in multisource settings adversely affect the processing of temporally nonoverlapping signals. Processing of these types of temporal sequences goes beyond passive coding of informational content and may have critical predictive value for processing of impending (future) speech segments and other periodic or quasiperiodic natural sounds as demonstrated in neural and psychophysical forward entrainment [75][76][77][78][79][80]. The current study shows that brain-lesioned individuals are particularly vulnerable to interfering sequences of sounds that mask the pattern of temporal information in a target sound.…”