Memory-Paced Tapping to Auditory Rhythms: Effects of Rate, Speech, and Motor Engagement

Abstract

Purpose: Humans have a near-automatic tendency to entrain their motor actions to rhythms in the environment. Entrainment has been hypothesized to play an important role in processing naturalistic stimuli, such as speech and music, which have intrinsically rhythmic properties. Here, we studied two facets of entraining one's rhythmic motor actions to an external stimulus: (a) synchronized finger tapping to auditory rhythmic stimuli and (b) memory-paced reproduction of a previously heard rhythm. Method: Using modifications of the Synchronization–Continuation tapping paradigm, we studied how these two rhythmic behaviors were affected by different stimulus and task features. We tested synchronization and memory-paced tapping for a broad range of rates, from stimulus onset asynchrony of subsecond to suprasecond, both for strictly isochronous tone sequences and for rhythmic speech stimuli (counting from 1 to 10), which are more ecological yet less isochronous. We also asked what role motor engagement plays in forming a stable internal representation for rhythms and guiding memory-paced tapping. Results and Conclusions: Our results show that individuals can flexibly synchronize their motor actions to a very broad range of rhythms. However, this flexibility does not extend to memory-paced tapping, which is accurate only in a narrower range of rates, around ~1.5 Hz. This pattern suggests that intrinsic rhythmic defaults in the auditory and/or motor system influence the internal representation of rhythms, in the absence of an external pacemaker. Interestingly, memory-paced tapping for speech rhythms and simple tone sequences shared similar “optimal rates,” although with reduced accuracy, suggesting that internal constraints on rhythmic entrainment generalize to more ecological stimuli. Last, we found that actively synchronizing to tones versus passively listening to them led to more accurate memory-paced tapping performance, which emphasizes the importance of action–perception interactions in forming stable entrainment to external rhythms.

Rhythmic tapping difficulties in adults who stutter: A deficit in beat perception, motor execution, or sensorimotor integration?

“…Second, the coupling of neuronal oscillations to an external beat frequency, observed in passive listening to rhythm, is enhanced when gestures, like finger tapping, are simultaneously produced [70]. Also, a more accurate and less variable reproduction of an isochronous sequence is observed after tapping along with the pattern, compared to passively listening before tapping [71]. Altogether, these observations support the idea that people build an internal representation of the beat by detecting the periodicity in sensory inputs without actual movement, but that this internal representation is nevertheless consolidated with engaging the motor system.…”

Studying rhythm processing in speech through the lens of auditory-motor synchronization

“…Auditory-motor interaction in speech processing has been an active field for decades (Hickok et al, 2011;Poeppel and Assaneo, 2020). Emerging evidence from finger-tapping studies suggests that this interaction exists not only at the basic rhythmic level (Rathcke et al, 2021;Kliger Amrani and Zion Golumbic, 2022) but also at higher levels, subject to variations in both acoustic and syntactical 10. 3389/fnins.2023.1146298 structures (Falk and Dalla Bella, 2016;Falk et al, 2017;Hilton and Goldwater, 2021).…”

“…Converging evidence has demonstrated that auditory-motor synchronization not only reflects basic beat-level perception and action timing (Cannon and Patel, 2021) but also drives more complex forms of rhythm perception, including those involving hierarchical rhythms (Iversen and Balasubramaniam, 2016). Recently, interest has grown in using speech stimuli (Lidji et al, 2011;Falk and Dalla Bella, 2016;Falk et al, 2017;Rathcke et al, 2021;Kliger Amrani and Zion Golumbic, 2022;Wei et al, 2022). Similar to the findings with non-speech stimuli, participants can accurately translate perceived rhythms in the speech into finger-tapping movements.…”

An Entrainment Oscillator Mechanism underlies Human Beat Matching Performance

“…A key feature of the SMA is that it is involved in both motor and non-motor tasks and, in particular, seems to create a bridge between the two networks. As such, the integration of sensorimotor systems with a forward prediction model allows for a stabilization of the internal timing interval, which is essential for beat perception in music (Amrani and Golumbic, 2022; Rosso et al, 2023).…”