Registered Report: Replication and Extension of

Cognitive neuroscience research has attempted to disentangle stimulus-driven processing from conscious perceptual processing for decades. Some prior evidence for neural processing of perceived musical beat (periodic pulse) may be confounded by stimulus-driven neural activity. However, one study used frequency tagging, which measures electrical brain activity at frequencies present in a stimulus, to show increased brain activity at imagery-related frequencies when listeners imagined a metrical pattern while listening to an isochronous auditory stimulus (Nozaradan et al., 2011) in a manner that controlled for stimulus factors. It is unclear though whether this represents repeatable evidence for conscious perception of beat and whether the effect is influenced by relevant music experience, such as music and dance training. This registered report details the results of 13 independent conceptual replications of Nozaradan et al. (2011), all using the same vetted protocol. Listeners performed the same imagery tasks as in Nozaradan et al. (2011), with the addition of a behavioral task on each trial to measure conscious perception. Meta-analyses examined the effect of imagery condition, revealing smaller raw effect sizes (Binary: 0.03 μV, Ternary: 0.03 μV) than in the original study (Binary: 0.12 μV, Ternary: 0.20 μV) with no moderating effects of music or dance training. The difference in estimated effects sizes (this study: n = 152, η =.03 - .04; 2011 study: n = 8, η =.62 - .76) suggests that large sample sizes may be required to reliably observe these effects, which challenges the use of frequency tagging as a method to study (neural correlates of) beat perception. Furthermore, a binary logistic regression on individual trials revealed that only neural activity at the stimulus frequency predicted performance on the imagery-related task; contrary to our hypothesis, the neural activity at the imagery-related frequency was not a significant predictor. We discuss possible explanations for discrepancies between these findings and the original study and implications of the extensions provided by this registered report.