Blinking indexes dynamic attending during and after music listening

Music's rhythmic structure and emotional content influence how attention is allocated. Behavioral research paradigms indicate that listening to music enhances attentional abilities. In this study, we investigated whether music listening affects the temporal dynamics of attention using eye-tracking. Fifty-seven middle-aged and older adults listened to music characterized as happy or sad, or silence for 10 minutes before and after completing the Attention Network Test. Attention was indexed using blink probabilities. The probability of a blink fluctuated, non-linearly, during happy and sad music listening, but not during silence listening. Blink timing patterns differed across the happy and sad music listening groups. Happy music appeared to enhance participants' adaptability to unexpected task demands, while sad music seemed to limit this adaptation. Overall, we show that blinking captures shifts in attention and that music listening influences the coordination of attention across time within the context of the Attention Network Test. These results provide further evidence supporting music listening as a therapeutic tool for boosting attention, particularly in older adults who experience attentional decline.