Bases neurales y comportamentales de la preparación mediante ritmos

Abstract

Temporal regularities present in our environment allow us not only to synchronize our movements to an external rhythm but also to generate temporal expectations about when a relevant event is going to occur (Nobre, Correa, & Coull, 2007). This synchronization, known as rhythmic entrainment, results in behavioural benefits in response to the events matching the temporal structure of the sequences, such as an enhancement of the reaction times (RT; Correa & Nobre, 2008; Sanabria, Capizzi, & Correa, 2011; Sanabria & Correa, 2013), time judgment (Barnes & Jones, 2000) or pitch judgment accuracy (Jones, Moynihan, McKenzie, & Puente, 2002). While several studies have suggested that this process is independent of top-down attention (Rohenkohl, Coull, & Nobre, 2011; Triviño et al., 2011; Correa et al., 2014), to our knowledge, only two of them have focused directly on the role of attention in the rhythmic entrainment, showing contradictory results (De la Rosa, Sanabria, Capizzi, & Correa, 2012; Schwartze, Rothermich, Schmidt-Kassow, & Kotz, 2011). The aim of the present thesis is to investigate whether top-down attentional processes are involved in the rhythmic entrainment and, moreover, to account for the role of the rhythmic entrainment as a basic process in a general predictive system. De la Rosa and colleagues (De la Rosa, Sanabria, Capizzi, & Correa, 2012) conducted an experiment under the dual-task paradigm in order to study the resistance of rhythmic entrainment to the concurrent performance of a secondary working memory task. According to the dual-task paradigm, the inclusion of a secondary would result in an impairment of performance in the primary task if both tasks compete for common limited resources (Logan, 1978, 1979).