The effect of beat frequency on eye movements during free viewing

Abstract

External periodic stimuli entrain brain oscillations and affect perception and attention. It has been shown that background music can change oculomotor behavior and facilitate detection of visual objects occurring on the musical beat. However, whether musical beats in different tempi modulate information sampling differently during natural viewing remains to be explored. Here we addressed this question by investigating how listening to naturalistic drum grooves in two different tempi affects eye movements of participants viewing natural scenes on a computer screen. We found that the beat frequency of the drum grooves modulated the rate of eye movements: fixation durations were increased at the lower beat frequency (1.7Hz) as compared to the higher beat frequency (2.4Hz) and no music conditions. Correspondingly, estimated visual sampling frequency decreased as fixation durations increased with lower beat frequency. These results imply that slow musical beats can retard sampling of visual information during natural viewing by increasing fixation durations.

Eye movements in scene perception while listening to slow and fast music

“…While previous studies (Maróti et al, 2017;Schäfer & Fachner, 2015) observed significantly longer fixations while listening to music compared to the no-music condi-tion, which suggests that listening to music while viewing visual images requires attentional resources, we did not succeed in fully replicating these results. Although we did not find significant differences between the music and the no-music condition, we observed a similar trend in both fixation durations and the number of fixations for both the entire viewing time and during the temporal evolution that is consistent with the previous studies (Maróti et al, 2017;Schäfer & Fachner, 2015).…”

“…According to this theory, the brain works on the basis of internal neural oscillations that are capable of entraining to external events and targeting attentional energy to expected points in time. In accordance with this theory, it can be expected that if visual attention synchronizes to the rhythm of musical beats, the rhythm of eye movements would align with the musical beats as well (Maróti et al, 2017). Maróti and her colleagues (2017) investigated the effects of music tempo (drum grooves) on the eye movements of participants viewing various natural scenes.…”

“…It is suggested that processing of urban scenes requires greater visual exploration, compared to natural scenes, because they are more difficult to process. The investigations of processing outdoor scenes while listening to music (Maróti et al, 2017;Schäfer & Fachner, 2015) observed significantly longer fixations while listening to music compared to the no-music condition, which suggests that listening to music while viewing visual images requires additional attentional resources. Thus, there is a question of how these two processes interact with each other, and whether the effect of background music on eye-movement behavior while viewing a scene in comparison to a silent control may be modulated by the type of scene (urban vs. natural).…”

“…Although there are numerous studies of eye movements and various musical activities in the field of sight-reading research (e.g., Drai-Zerbib, Baccino, & Bigand, 2012;Goolsby, 1994;Madell & Héébert, 2008;Wurtz, Mueri, & Wiesendanger, 2009), analysis of eye movements in the perception of outdoor scenes while listening to music has started to be investigated only recently. To date, there have been only two relevant eye-tracking studies (Maróti, Knakker, Vidnyánszky, & Weiss, 2017;Schäfer & Fachner, 2015); however, they investigated different facets of this problem. Schäfer and Fachner (2015) were interested in the attentional shift from visual perception of outdoor scenes to absorption in music, while Maróti and her colleagues (2017) investigated changes in eye movement parameters (such as fixation duration, saccade duration, saccade amplitude, and saccade number) in relation to musical tempo.…”

“…Coutrot, Guyader, Ionescu, & Caplier (2012) investigated the viewing of videos with and without their original soundtracks and found longer fixation durations and longer saccade amplitudes in an audio-visual condition than in a visual one. In the study by Maróti et al (2017), participants listened to drum sequences while viewing various natural scenes. It was found that fixation durations and average intersaccade intervals were longer for the drum sequence conditions compared with the quiet condition.…”