نبذة مختصرة : M.Phil. ; Much research supports the idea that auditory rhythms temporally align the ups and downs of visual attention. Nevertheless, this idea still lacks a strong test that addresses important confounds and that dissociates the potential roles of sound metricality and regularity. Here, I set out to provide such a test. In three experiments, participants saw happy and neutral faces at different intervals appear left or right of a central fixation point. Their task was to indicate the face position. Participants completed this task across five stimulus blocks with varying background. In one block the background was silent, whereas in the other four blocks there were auditory background sounds. The sounds were organized into three second measures that were high or low in metricality and that were either kept constant or changed throughout a block. Thus, the four auditory background blocks manipulated metricality and regularity orthogonally. Importantly, measures in each block comprised a silent period around the fourth beat during which faces were presented. Specifically, faces were shown on the silent beat position or at earlier and later metrical and non-metrical off-beat positions. The exact off-beat positions varied across the three experiments as to account for confounding local temporal expectations. The results fail to support the idea that auditory rhythms temporally align visual attention. Contrary to prediction, neither reaction times nor accuracy yielded an interaction between background metricality and the temporal position of face targets. Instead, a background with metricality or high regularity facilitated behavioral performance irrespective of when face targets occurred. Together, these results suggest that metrical and regular stimulus sequences affect visual attention in a non-rhythmical way possibly by facilitating auditory representations and freeing mental resources for processing in another modality. ...
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