Dear all,

You are invited to attend McGill's Cognitive Area Seminar this *Friday March 11th, 3:30 - 5 PM *(*location *= 1205 Docteur Penfield Ave., Room S3/4).

*Our speaker is Dr. Molly Henry* (Post-doc, Brain and Mind Institute, The University of Western Ontario), who will talk about "*The neural dynamics of sensing a beat*". See below dashed line for a full abstract.

*Directly after the talk (@5:15 PM), there will be a social at the Thomson House* (http://thomsonhouse.ca/home): Please join if you would like to speak with Dr. Henry at greater length.

Hope that you are able to attend! If not, please see our schedule for future talks @ https://www.mcgill.ca/psychology/events-colloquia-0/brownbag-series.

Best, Anna

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*The neural dynamics of sensing a beat*

Molly J. Henry, Department of Psychology, Brain and Mind Institute, The University of Western Ontario

The ability to pick up on regularities in environmental stimuli is apparent in infancy and supports language learning, movement coordination, and parsing auditory scenes into “objects”. In the Music and Neuroscience Lab at The University of Western Ontario, we are investigating the seemingly unique sensitivity humans show to temporal regularities in rhythm: they spontaneously feel a “beat” in rhythmic sequences. I’ll first describe my previous work demonstrating that neural oscillations (i.e., brain rhythms) synchronize with auditory rhythms, and in turn affect psychophysical performance by changing the relative timing between excitable phases of the entrained neural oscillation and near-threshold stimulus events. Then, I’ll spend time describing in-progress EEG work in which we examine how synchronization of neural oscillations with auditory rhythms might give rise to beat perception. The results demonstrate that subharmonic entrainment is stronger during listening to rhythms with a strong beat (compared to rhythms without a beat), and will link electrophysiological correlates of beat perception with the psychophysical consequences of sensing a beat.