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Review
. 2022 Apr:54:101102.
doi: 10.1016/j.dcn.2022.101102. Epub 2022 Mar 25.

Oscillatory entrainment to our early social or physical environment and the emergence of volitional control

S V Wass  1 , M Perapoch Amadó  2 , J Ives  2
Affiliations
Review

Oscillatory entrainment to our early social or physical environment and the emergence of volitional control

S V Wass et al. Dev Cogn Neurosci. 2022 Apr.

Abstract

An individual's early interactions with their environment are thought to be largely passive; through the early years, the capacity for volitional control develops. Here, we consider: how is the emergence of volitional control characterised by changes in the entrainment observed between internal activity (behaviour, physiology and brain activity) and the sights and sounds in our everyday environment (physical and social)? We differentiate between contingent responsiveness (entrainment driven by evoked responses to external events) and oscillatory entrainment (driven by internal oscillators becoming temporally aligned with external oscillators). We conclude that ample evidence suggests that children show behavioural, physiological and neural entrainment to their physical and social environment, irrespective of volitional attention control; however, evidence for oscillatory entrainment beyond contingent responsiveness is currently lacking. Evidence for how oscillatory entrainment changes over developmental time is also lacking. Finally, we suggest a mechanism through which periodic environmental rhythms might facilitate both sensory processing and the development of volitional control even in the absence of oscillatory entrainment.

Keywords: Contingent responsiveness; Effortful control; Entrainment sensitivity; Executive control; Infancy; Oscillations; Synchrony.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Sam Wass reports financial support was provided by European Research Council.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
(a) Schematic illustrating the popular approach to understanding the relationship between neural phase and performance. Information that arrives at times of high neuronal excitability (shown red) evokes a larger phasic neural response (b) which in turn associates with increased behavioural sensitivity (c).
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Illustrating three different mechanisms that might underlie the relationship between the timing of sensory input and phase-related changes in neural excitability. a) a classical ‘top-down’ entrainment model, top-down modulation changes the phase of the underlying neuronal activity to align the neuronal oscillatory activity with the attended-to sensory stream; b) top-down modulation in anticipation to aperiodic stimuli; c) an illustration of the ‘dumb’ oscillator mechanism described in Section 5.2.2. An isochronous auditory cue facilitates perceptual processing of a subsequent target in cases where the target in presented in-phase with the previous auditory cue.
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