Frequency‐ and phase‐dependent effects of auditory entrainment on attentional blink

Attentional blink (AB) is the impaired detection of a second target (T2) after a first target has been identified. In this paper, we investigated the functional roles of alpha and theta oscillations on AB by determining how much preceding rhythmic auditory stimulation affected the performance of AB. Healthy young adults participated in the experiment online. We found that when two targets were embedded in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of distractors at 10 Hz (i.e., alpha frequency), the magnitude of AB increased with auditory stimuli. The increase was limited to the case when the frequency and phase of auditory stimuli matched the following RSVP stream. On the contrary, when only two targets were presented without distractors, auditory stimuli at theta, not alpha, increased the AB magnitude. These results indicate that neural oscillations at two different frequencies, namely, alpha and theta, are involved in attentional blink. Attentional blink (AB) shows the temporal constraints of attention. We here studied how much preceding rhythmic auditory stimulation affected the performance of AB. Auditory stimuli at the alpha frequency increased the AB magnitude in the conventional AB paradigm with distractors, while auditory stimuli at the theta, not alpha, increased the AB magnitude in the AB paradigm without distractors. These results suggest that two different brain oscillations, theta and alpha, underlie AB processes depending on the existence of distractors.