Time-oriented attention improves accuracy in a paced finger-tapping task

Finger tapping is a task widely used in a variety of experimental paradigms, in particular to understand sensorimotor synchronization and time processing in the range of hundreds of milliseconds (millisecond timing). Normally, subjects do not receive any instruction about what to attend to and the r...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Versaci, Leonardo, Laje, Rodrigo
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2021
Country:Argentina
Institution:Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
Repository:CONICET Digital (CONICET)
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:ri.conicet.gov.ar:11336/165587
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/11336/165587
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:ATTENTION
EVENT-RELATED POTENTIALS
FINGER TAPPING
SENSORIMOTOR SYNCHRONIZATION
TIME PROCESSING
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/1.6
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/1
Description
Summary:Finger tapping is a task widely used in a variety of experimental paradigms, in particular to understand sensorimotor synchronization and time processing in the range of hundreds of milliseconds (millisecond timing). Normally, subjects do not receive any instruction about what to attend to and the results are seldom interpreted taking into account the possible effects of attention. In this work we show that attention can be oriented to the purely temporal aspects of a paced finger-tapping task and that it affects performance. Specifically, time-oriented attention improves the accuracy in paced finger tapping and it also increases the resynchronization efficiency after a period perturbation. We use two markers of the attention level: auditory ERPs and subjective report of the mental workload. In addition, we propose a novel algorithm to separate the auditory, stimulus-related components from the somatosensory, response-related ones, which are naturally overlapped in the recorded EEG.