Spontaneous motor tempo over the course of a week: the role of the time of the day, chronotype, and arousal

Abstract

The spontaneous motor tempo (SMT) or internal tempo describes the natural pace of predictive and emergent movements such as walking or hand clapping. One of the main research interests in the study of the spontaneous motor tempo relates to factors affecting its pace. Previous studies suggest an influence of the circadian rhythm (i.e., 24-h cycle of the biological clock), physiological arousal changes, and potentially also musical experience. This study aimed at investigating these effects in participants‘ everyday life by measuring their SMT four times a day over seven consecutive days, using an experience sampling method. The pace of the SMT was assessed with a finger-tapping paradigm in a self-developed web application. Measured as the inter-tap interval, the overall mean SMT was 650 ms (SD = 253 ms). Using multi-level modelling (MLM), results show that the pace of the SMT sped up over the course of the day, and that this effect depended on the participants’ chronotype, since participants tending towards morning type were faster in the morning compared to participants tending towards evening type. During the day, the pace of the SMT of morning types stayed relatively constant, whereas it became faster for evening-type participants. Furthermore, higher arousal in participants led to a faster pace of the SMT. Musical sophistication did not influence the SMT. These results indicate that the circadian rhythm influences the internal tempo, since the pace of SMT is not only dependent on the time of the day, but also on the individual entrainment to the 24-h cycle (chronotype).

Spontaneous rates exhibit high intra-individual stability across movements involving different biomechanical systems and cognitive demands

“…Self-paced finger-tapping rate, for instance, commonly referred to as spontaneous motor tempo (SMT) 1 , has been measured in various contextsranging from clinical 2,3 over developmental biological 4 to comparative investigations 5 . SMT has shown consistent intra-individual stability across several trials of the same task 1,6,7 (for an overview, see Ref. 8 ), yet this measure is also being discussed to be subject to contextual influences like arousal and time-of-day 6,7 , to individual influences like musicianship and age [9][10][11][12] and to interacting factors like chronotype 7 .…”

“…SMT has shown consistent intra-individual stability across several trials of the same task 1,6,7 (for an overview, see Ref. 8 ), yet this measure is also being discussed to be subject to contextual influences like arousal and time-of-day 6,7 , to individual influences like musicianship and age [9][10][11][12] and to interacting factors like chronotype 7 . Spontaneous production or performance rate (SPR) is a measure of the more cognitively complex act of producing musical sequences 13,14 more seldomly speech sequences 15 .…”

Time of day and sleep effects on motor acquisition and consolidation

“…Astonishingly, although several studies have shown that motor and mental performances fluctuate across the day, following a circadian basis (∼24 h) 16 – 18 , the search for the optimal time-of-day for motor learning has not yet retained great attention. Daily variations were observed for maximal voluntary contractions 19 , spontaneous motor tempo 20 , speed/accuracy tradeoff of actual and mental movements 21 , handwriting 22 , and tennis service 23 . In all studies, better performances in strength or skill were consistently reported in the late afternoon than early in the morning.…”

A common timing mechanism across different millisecond domains: evidence from perceptual and motor tasks

“…In a different task type, after the introductory phase in which participants synchronise their tapping with external sounds, participants are asked to continue tapping a series without any external cues (continuation tapping task); in another type, the participant taps according to their comfortable and preferred pace, without any time pressure (spontaneous tapping task). Previous researchers have shown that spontaneous motor tempo can be observed across a broad range of activities, including walking 27 . Most of the tapping tasks listed above highly engage the participant’s working memory 1 .…”