TY - JOUR T1 - Stimulating music supports attention in listeners with attentional difficulties JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/2021.10.01.462777 SP - 2021.10.01.462777 AU - Kevin JP Woods AU - Gonçalo Sampaio AU - Tedra James AU - Emily Przysinda AU - Adam Hewett AU - Andrea E Spencer AU - Benjamin Morillon AU - Psyche Loui Y1 - 2021/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/10/12/2021.10.01.462777.abstract N2 - Background music is widely used to sustain attention, but little is known about what musical properties aid attention. This may be due to inter-individual variability in neural responses to music. We test the hypothesis that music can sustain attention by affecting oscillations via acoustic amplitude modulation, differentially for those with varying levels of attentional difficulty. We first show that heavily-modulated music improves sustained attention for participants with more ADHD symptoms. FMRI showed this music elicited greater activity in attentional networks in this group only, and EEG showed greater stimulus-brain coupling for this group in response to the heavily-modulated music. Finally, we parametrically manipulated the depth and rate of amplitude modulations inserted in otherwise-identical music, and found that beta-range modulations helped more than other frequency ranges for participants with more ADHD symptoms. Results suggest the possibility of an oscillation-based neural mechanism for targeted music to support improved cognitive performance.Competing Interest StatementKevin JP Woods is an employee of Brain.fm. Adam Hewett was an employee of Brain.fm when the work was conducted. ER -