Entrainment of Voluntary Movement to Undetected Auditory Regularities

Abstract

In physics “entrainment” refers to the synchronization of two coupled oscillators with similar fundamental frequencies. In behavioral science, entrainment refers to the tendency of humans to synchronize their movements with rhythmic stimuli. Here, we asked whether human subjects performing a tapping task would entrain their tapping to an undetected auditory rhythm surreptitiously introduced in the guise of ambient background noise in the room. Subjects performed two different tasks, one in which they tapped their finger at a steady rate of their own choosing and one in which they performed a single abrupt finger tap on each trial after a delay of their own choosing. In both cases we found that subjects tended to tap in phase with the inducing modulation, with some variability in the preferred phase across subjects, consistent with prior research. In the repetitive tapping task, if the frequency of the inducing stimulus was far from the subject’s own self-paced frequency, then entrainment was abolished, consistent with the properties of entrainment in physics. Thus, undetected ambient noise can influence self-generated movements. This suggests that uncued decisions to act are never completely endogenous, but are subject to subtle unnoticed influences from the sensory environment.

Spontaneous and stimulus-driven rhythmic behaviors in ADHD adults and controls

“…In other words, at least for most individuals the SMT/PPT seem to fall within the 'sweet spot' for optimal continuation tapping, and when attempting to perform memory-based tapping for faster/slower rhythms, de-facto tapping rates drifted towards producing rhythms in the vicinity of one's SMT/PPT. This pattern is consistent with the notion that individuals have a preferred range of rhythms, within which complex rhythmic behavior and perceptual sensitivity is optimal (McPherson et al, 2018;Phillips-Silver et al, 2011;Scheurich et al, 2018;Schurger et al, 2017;Zamm et al, 2015Zamm et al, , 2018, and extends these findings to memory-based continuation tapping. Interestingly, similar U-shape patterns were observed for the ADHD and control groups around their SMT/PPTs, eventhough the SMT/PPT rhythms themselves were slightly faster in the ADHD groups.…”

The Influence of Auditory Cues on Bodily and Movement Perception

“…The present findings support the view that auditory stimuli, particularly naturalistic sound, has a substantial contribution to dynamic modulations of movement. That recent work has shown that undetected auditory cues can have influences on voluntary movement (tapping speed and single taps following delay of the participant's choosing), suggesting that decisions to act are amenable to unnoticed sensory influences from the surrounding environment (Schurger et al, 2017).…”

1 | 2 | 2020 4E Cognition: Aesthetics, Ecology and Beyond

“…However, oscillatory activity does not even have to reach the level of conscious awareness to affect cognition. Experiments conducted by Schurger et al (2017) have shown that undetected auditory regularities entrain voluntary movement. These and related phenomena JOLMA e-ISSN 2723-9640 1, 2, 2020, 195-214 206 appear to be part of a shared mechanism: the rhythmic entrainment of slow cortical oscillations to the temporal structure of a stream of stimuli (Schroeder, Lakatos 2009).…”