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Sensorimotor synchronization (SMS) is the mainly specifically human ability to move in sync with a periodic external stimulus, as in keeping pace with music. The most common experimental paradigm to study its largely unknown underlying mechanism is the paced finger-tapping task, where a participant taps to a periodic sequence of brief stimuli. Contrary to reaction time, this task involves temporal prediction because the participant needs to trigger the motor action in advance for the tap and the stimulus to occur simultaneously, then an error-correction mechanism takes past performance as input to adjust the following prediction. In a different, simpler task, it has been shown that exposure to a distribution of individual temporal intervals creates a “temporal context” that can bias the estimation/production of a single target interval. As temporal estimation and production are also involved in SMS, we asked whether a paced finger-tapping task with period perturbations would show any time-related context effect. In this work we show that a perturbation context can indeed be generated by exposure to period perturbations during paced finger tapping, affecting the shape and size of the resynchronization curve. Response asymmetry is also affected, thus evidencing an interplay between context and intrinsic nonlinearities of the correction mechanism. We conclude that perturbation context calibrates the underlying error-correction mechanism in SMS.
Sensorimotor synchronization (SMS) is the mainly specifically human ability to move in sync with a periodic external stimulus, as in keeping pace with music. The most common experimental paradigm to study its largely unknown underlying mechanism is the paced finger-tapping task, where a participant taps to a periodic sequence of brief stimuli. Contrary to reaction time, this task involves temporal prediction because the participant needs to trigger the motor action in advance for the tap and the stimulus to occur simultaneously, then an error-correction mechanism takes past performance as input to adjust the following prediction. In a different, simpler task, it has been shown that exposure to a distribution of individual temporal intervals creates a “temporal context” that can bias the estimation/production of a single target interval. As temporal estimation and production are also involved in SMS, we asked whether a paced finger-tapping task with period perturbations would show any time-related context effect. In this work we show that a perturbation context can indeed be generated by exposure to period perturbations during paced finger tapping, affecting the shape and size of the resynchronization curve. Response asymmetry is also affected, thus evidencing an interplay between context and intrinsic nonlinearities of the correction mechanism. We conclude that perturbation context calibrates the underlying error-correction mechanism in SMS.
We determined the intersubject association between the rhythmic entrainment abilities of human subjects during a synchronization-continuation tapping task (SCT) and the macro- and microstructural properties of their superficial (SWM) and deep (DWM) white matter. Diffusion-weighted images were obtained from 32 subjects who performed the SCT with auditory or visual metronomes and five tempos ranging from 550 to 950 ms. We developed a method to determine the density of short-range fibers that run underneath the cortical mantle, interconnecting nearby cortical regions (U-fibers). Notably, individual differences in the density of U-fibers in the right audiomotor system were correlated with the degree of phase accuracy between the stimuli and taps across subjects. These correlations were specific to the synchronization epoch with auditory metronomes and tempos around 1.5 Hz. In addition, a significant association was found between phase accuracy and the density and bundle diameter of the corpus callosum (CC), forming an interval-selective map where short and long intervals were behaviorally correlated with the anterior and posterior portions of the CC. These findings suggest that the structural properties of the SWM and DWM in the audiomotor system support the tapping synchronization abilities of subjects, as cortical U-fiber density is linked to the preferred tapping tempo and the bundle properties of the CC define an interval-selective topography.
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