Experimental study reveals high-frequency binaural beats eliminate attentional blink in individuals with low eye-blink rates, suggesting cognitive enhancement requires baseline tailoring.
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.
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Reedijk et al. (2015) studied this question.
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