Abstract
Enhancing human cognitive performance is a topic that continues to spark scientific interest. Studies into cognitive-enhancement techniques often fail to take inter-individual differences into account, however, which leads to underestimation of the effectiveness of these techniques. The current study investigated the effect of binaural beats, a cognitive-enhancement technique, on attentional control in an attentional blink (AB) task. As predicted from a neurocognitive approach to cognitive control, high-frequency binaural beats eliminated the AB, but only in individuals with low spontaneous eye-blink rates (indicating low striatal dopamine levels). This suggests that the way in which cognitive-enhancement techniques, such as binaural beats, affect cognitive performance depends on inter-individual differences.
Highlights
Humans have used cognitive and physical interventions to improve their performance, and new cognitive-enhancement techniques are announced daily
We found evidence for the enhancement of attentional control through high-frequency binaural beats
The success of the enhancement intervention was predicted by EBR, our marker of the individual striatal dopamine level
Summary
Humans have used cognitive and physical interventions to improve their performance, and new cognitive-enhancement techniques are announced daily. Many tests are likely to systematically underestimate the potential of enhancement techniques by ignoring inter-individual differences in cognitive or neural parameters that determine or reflect individual sensitivity to interventions. One indication that individual differences play an important role in the degree to which enhancement techniques affect cognition is the observation that the widely assumed creativityenhancing effect of positive mood [3] is mediated by individual differences related to dopamine levels. As demonstrated by Akbari Chermahini and Hommel [4], individuals with low dopamine levels (as assessed by spontaneous eye-blink rates; EBRs) show better performance in a divergentthinking task after the induction of positive mood, while individuals with medium or high dopamine levels show no effect. Studies that neglect functionally relevant individual differences can be expected to replicate or fail to replicate the assumed connection between creativity and mood, depending on the specific characteristics of the given sample – which explains the great inconsistency between the available studies [see Ref. [3]]
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