Registered Report: Replication and Extension of Nozaradan et al. (2011)

Cognitive neuroscience has long sought to disentangle stimulus-driven processing from conscious perceptual processing. Some prior evidence for neural processing of perceived musical beat (periodic pulse) may be confounded by stimulus-driven activity. Nozaradan et al. controlled for stimulus factors and used frequency tagging to show increased brain activity at imagery-related frequencies when listeners imagined a beat pattern during an isochronous stimulus. However, it remains unclear whether this effect is replicable and whether it reliably reflects conscious beat perception. In this registered report, we present 13 independent replications using the same vetted protocol. Listeners performed the same experimental paradigm as in Nozaradan et al. with an added behavioral task on each trial to assess conscious perception of the imagined beat. Preregistered meta-analyses revealed smaller raw effect sizes of imagery condition (binary = 0.03 µV, ternary = 0.03 µV) than the original study (binary = 0.12 µV, ternary = 0.20 µV) with confidence intervals all overlapping with zero. Differences in full-sample estimated effect sizes (this study: N = 152, η _p ² s = .03–.04; 2011 study: N = 8, η _p ² s = .62–.76) suggest larger sample sizes are necessary to detect these effects reliably if they exist. In addition, only neural activity at the stimulus frequency predicted imagery-task accuracy, contradicting our hypothesis that beat-related frequencies would predict performance. Our findings suggest an overall failure to replicate all main effects from the original study. We discuss potential reasons for discrepancies with the original study and implications for the utility of frequency tagging for studying beat perception.