Attention is a matter of time: effects of rhythmic stimulation on newborns’ attentional disengagement

The Dynamic Attending Theory postulates that ongoing temporal structure of events entrains attention and affects perception (Jones et al., 2002). According to this theory, rhythm, defined as a sequence of short repeated intervals with regularities that allow us to build expectancies, is one of the main temporal cue which guides attention and facilitates performances in both visual and auditory domains. Evidence from the adult literature supports this hypothesis, showing that rhythm boosts perception (e.g., Elbaz & Yeshurun, 2020). However, no study has explored whether the rhythmic structure of external stimuli improves the efficiency with which infants attend to and process them. Given the ubiquitous nature of rhythms in the perceptual environment of the infant across the perinatal period, this question appears compelling. Indeed, it has been shown that foetuses in the last trimester of gestation are responsive to rhythmic stimulation that reaches them through the auditory, vestibular and tactile sensory channels (Lecanuet & Schaal, 2002), and it is claimed that this early exposure to rhythm plays a key role in the development of early communicative and cognitive abilities (Provasi et al., 2014). On this ground, we hypothesised that exposing the foetus to an enriched rhythmic environment might affect early infants’ attentional capabilities, which could be boosted by prenatal experience. The current study is part of a larger project aimed at testing this hypothesis, and was planned as a pilot investigation of the impact of rhythm on the orienting of visual spatial attention at birth. Two-day-old newborns were tested in an overlap task where a central stimulus, S1, was followed by a peripheral target, S2, (see Fig.1) and saccadic reaction times towards S2 were recorded as measure of attentional disengagement. S1 remained on the screen until the infant’s gaze landed on S2. On each trial, the same image was presented as S1 and S2. We manipulated the attributes of S1 within-subjects to obtain three different S1 conditions: the Static condition, in which S1 remained still on the screen, the Rhythmic condition, in which S1 flickered at the rate of 500 ms on and 400 ms off, and the Random condition, in which S1 flickered at a random rate. We planned to reach a sample size of at least N = 28, as resulting from an a-priori power analysis. Data collection is still in progress. Preliminary results from the first 6 newborns suggest that both the dynamic and rhythmic nature of the central stimulus affected saccadic latency, as the static condition induced the fastest latencies, and the rhythmic condition is associated with the slowest latencies. If confirmed by the data from the final sample, this pattern of results would suggest that rhythm is perceived as particularly salient and captivating at birth, thus constraining the efficiency of attentional orienting.