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A growing body of evidence suggests that steady-state evoked potentials may be a useful measure of beat perception, particularly when obtaining traditional, explicit measures of beat perception is difficult, such as with infants or non-human animals. Although attending to a stimulus is not necessary for most traditional applications of steady-state evoked potentials, it is unknown how attention affects steady-state evoked potentials that arise in response to beat perception. Additionally, most applications of steady-state evoked potentials to measure beat perception have used repeating rhythms or real music. Therefore, it is unclear how the steady-state response relates to the robust beat perception that occurs with non-repeating rhythms. Here, we used electroencephalography to record participants' brain activity as they listened to non-repeating musical rhythms while either attending to the rhythms or while distracted by a concurrent visual task. Non-repeating auditory rhythms elicited steady-state evoked potentials at perceived beat frequencies (perception was validated in a separate sensorimotor synchronization task) that were larger when participants attended to the rhythms compared with when they were distracted by the visual task. Therefore, although steady-state evoked potentials appear to index beat perception to non-repeating musical rhythms, this technique may be limited to when participants are known to be attending to the stimulus., (© 2023 The Authors. European Journal of Neuroscience published by Federation of European Neuroscience Societies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

THE ABILITY TO PERCEIVE AND PRODUCE A BEAT IS believed to be universal in humans, but individual ability varies. The current study examined four factors that may influence beat perception and production capacity: 1) expertise: music or dance, 2) training style: percussive or nonpercussive, 3) stimulus modality: auditory or visual, and 4) movement type: finger-tap or whole-body bounce. Experiment 1 examined how expertise and training style influenced beat perception and production performance using an auditory beat perception task and a finger-tapping beat production task. Experiment 2 used a similar sample with an audiovisual variant of the beat perception task, and a standing knee-bend (bounce) beat production task to assess whole-body movement. The data showed that: 1) musicians were more accurate in a finger-tapping beat synchronization task compared to dancers and controls, 2) training style did not significantly influence beat perception and production, 3) visual beat information did not benefit any group, and 4) beat synchronization in a full-body movement task was comparable for musicians and dancers; both groups outperformed controls. The current study suggests that the type of task and measured response interacts with expertise, and that expertise effects may be masked by selection of nonoptimal response types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]