Influence of rhythmic contexts on perception: No behavioral and eye-tracker evidence for rhythmic entrainment Román Caballero, Rafael Martín Arévalo, Elisa Martín Sánchez, Paulina del Carmen Lupiáñez Castillo, Juan Capizzi, Mariagrazia Rhythm Entrainment Dynamic Attending Theory Foreperiod Pupillometry This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions with a Global Postdoctoral Fellowship to RRC (project No 101149355) and by two research grants funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and ERDF/EU to JL (PID2020-114790GB-I00 and PID2023-148421NB-I00) and to MC (PID2021-128696NA-I00), respectively. MC also acknowledges support of a Maria Zambrano Fellowship at the University of Granada from the Spanish Ministry of Universities and the European Union NextGeneration. Entrainment theories propose that attention inherently oscillates between moments of attentional enhancement and disengagement. Consequently, perceptual and response benefits have been reported in tasks with a rhythmic structure. In the present study, we report two preregistered auditory experiments attempting to replicate previous supporting behavioral evidence of entrainment theories. In addition, we incorporated eye-tracker measures. Both Experiment 1 (duration discrimination task) and Experiment 2 (pitch discrimination task) showed no phase- specific benefit of rhythmic sequences compared to arrhythmic ones. Importantly, a tonic larger pupil size for arrhythmic conditions was observed irrespective of target phase, suggesting higher processing demands or arousal state imposed by a sustained uncertain context. Overall, the present results call into question whether the perceptual benefits predicted by entrainment theories are generalizable across all experimental designs and paradigms. On the contrary, our findings join a large group of studies that have failed to replicate the foundational results of attentional entrainment. 2025-03-03T13:29:44Z 2025-03-03T13:29:44Z 2024 journal article Published version: R. Román-Caballero et al. Consciousness and Cognition 126 (2024) 103789. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2024.103789 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/102822 10.1016/j.concog.2024.103789 eng info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/101149355 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional Elsevier