Schedule of Events | Symposia

Representing rhythm in the Parkinson’s brain: Evidence from EEG

Poster Session A - Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00 – 5:00 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Hannah Guglin¹, Emma Cozzi¹, Josh Keough¹, David DiStefano¹, Elizabeth Race¹; ¹Tufts University

Accurate temporal processing plays a critical role in both cognition and action. Yet, how the brain codes time and uses temporal signals to guide adaptive behavior remains an open question. The basal ganglia has been proposed to play a key role in the coding of rhythmic temporal information, particularly when internal generation of the beat is required (Grahn, 2009; Nozaradan et al., 2017). Yet, patients with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) with basal ganglia dysfunction can still leverage external rhythmic cues to benefit motor action, as demonstrated in rhythmic auditory stimulation therapies (Koshimori & Thaut, 2023). The current study tested the hypothesis that the processing of external rhythms does not critically depend on the basal ganglia and can be supported by the alignment of cortical activity to the temporal structure of the beat (neural tracking of rhythm). Electroencephalography was recorded while patients with Parkinson’s Disease and healthy controls listened to three rhythmic sequences with a steady 1.25Hz beat: an unsyncopated rhythm, a syncopated rhythm, and a more complex instrumental music clip. Both patients and controls demonstrated significant neural tracking, evident in increased power at the beat frequency (1.25Hz), and the magnitude of neural tracking did not differ across groups. Interestingly, this cortical tracking response did not differ within or across groups according to the complexity of the auditory stimulus or the degree to which the rhythm required more internal generation of the beat. These results suggest that cortical tracking of rhythm does not critically depend on the basal ganglia.

Topic Area: ATTENTION: Auditory