Natural rhythms of periodic temporal attention

Temporal attention allows flexible focusing in time, yet whether it is constrained by an intrinsic rhythmic neural mechanism is unclear. Across six interrelated behavioral experiments in auditory and visual modalities, the authors quantify periodic temporal attention’s sampling capacities. They reveal limited attentional capacities with optimal sampling rates of ~1.4 Hz in audition and ~0.7 Hz in vision. Assessing motor contributions, they show motor rhythmic precision peaks at ~1.7 Hz and modulates temporal attention: overt motor tracking benefits auditory temporal attention but impairs visual temporal attention. A coupled-oscillator computational model (stimulus–attention–motor) reproduces these findings and highlights structural constraints—particularly sensory-specific intrinsic attention rhythms and modality-dependent sensorimotor delays—that govern temporal alignment between motor and attentional fluctuations.

Arnaud Zalta, Spase Petkoski, Benjamin Morillon