Musical neurofeedback and its application to attention enhancement

Abstract

Attention is important in a busy life. Neurofeedback training can enhance the attention. However, there is only visual feedback and simple sound feedback for clinical and research purpose. Using musical feedback, because lots of people listen to music while driving or studying, it can be used in real life. However, music is a time-variant stimulus. This makes it an important feature how the music changes over time in musical neurofeedback. 11 male subjects participated in this study. The arrow flanker task was used to measure participants’ attention. With classical music, Vivaldi’s “Four Seosons”: “Spring”, playing with varying speed while working showed a significant effect. In case of pop music, Psy’s “Gangnam style” significantly influenced the attention when its volume was changed. Volume variation in classical music was hard to be recognized, and slow pop music was too annoying to enhance attention. Neurofeedback done simultaneously with the tasks simultaneously had less effect on the attention than neurofeedback done prior to performing tasks. Depending on the music characteristics, efficient variation method is different. In further studies, other music genre and variation method would be used in the task. In addition, customizing effect would be examined as well. Musical feedback is less intuitive than visual neurofeedback, and a long adapting time is needed. Applying fitting process using the bar feedback would be advantageous to attention enhancement.