Blinking indexes dynamic attending during and after music listening

Music's rhythmic structure and emotional content can influence how attention is allocated. While much of the existing research has focused on music's ability to enhance attentional performance through behavioral tasks, our study aims to expand this knowledge by investigating how music affects the temporal dynamics of attention using eye-tracking. Fifty-seven middle-aged and older adults listened to music characterized as happy or sad music, or silence for 10 minutes before and after completing the Attention Network Test (ANT). Attention was indexed using blink probabilities. We hypothesized that happy and sad music would differentially influence blinking dynamics during music listening and during completion of the ANT. The probability of a blink fluctuated, non-linearly, during happy and sad music listening, but not during silence listening. Notably, participants in the happy music group inhibited blinking when the flanker task was preceded by temporally or spatially uninformative cues, whereas sad music and silence did not affect blinking before the flanker task onset. Blinking also predicted faster response times in the happy music group and slower response times in the sad music group. Overall, our results demonstrate that music listening modulates the temporal dynamics of attention, highlighting its potential to serve as a therapeutic tool for enhancing attentional performance, particularly in older adults where attentional decline is common.