BAASTA: Battery for the Assessment of Auditory Sensorimotor and Timing Abilities

Abstract

The Battery for the Assessment of Auditory Sensorimotor and Timing Abilities (BAASTA) is a new tool for the systematic assessment of perceptual and sensorimotor timing skills. It spans a broad range of timing skills aimed at differentiating individual timing profiles. BAASTA consists of sensitive time perception and production tasks. Perceptual tasks include duration discrimination, anisochrony detection (with tones and music), and a version of the Beat Alignment Task. Perceptual thresholds for duration discrimination and anisochrony detection are estimated with a maximum likelihood procedure (MLP) algorithm. Production tasks use finger tapping and include unpaced and paced tapping (with tones and music), synchronization-continuation, and adaptive tapping to a sequence with a tempo change. BAASTA was tested in a proof-of-concept study with 20 non-musicians (Experiment 1). To validate the results of the MLP procedure, less widespread than standard staircase methods, three perceptual tasks of the battery (duration discrimination, anisochrony detection with tones, and with music) were further tested in a second group of non-musicians using 2 down / 1 up and 3 down / 1 up staircase paradigms (n = 24) (Experiment 2). The results show that the timing profiles provided by BAASTA allow to detect cases of timing/rhythm disorders. In addition, perceptual thresholds yielded by the MLP algorithm, although generally comparable to the results provided by standard staircase, tend to be slightly lower. In sum, BAASTA provides a comprehensive battery to test perceptual and sensorimotor timing skills, and to detect timing/rhythm deficits.

Auditory-Motor Rhythms and Speech Processing in French and German Listeners

“…Their taps rather preceded the metronome tones (synchronization direction = −53.15 ms; 95%-CI = ±7.52 ms), as typically reported in tapping studies (negative mean asynchrony, e.g., Aschersleben, 2002). Synchronization consistency was within the normal range (mean SE = 9.05; 95%-CI = ±0.5) for a comparable population of young adults (e.g., Dalla Bella et al, 2016). …”

“…To this goal, synchronization accuracy (i.e., the synchronization error and its direction) and synchronization consistency were calculated (e.g., Aschersleben, 2002; Repp and Penel, 2004; Repp, 2005; Sowiński and Dalla Bella, 2013; Dalla Bella et al, 2016). The synchronization error and its direction were obtained by computing the absolute and the signed (positive or negative) mean delays between the taps and the metronome, respectively.…”

Motor simulation theories of musical beat perception

“…The auditory stream may be as simple as a metronome or as complex as a highly layered and time-varying musical work, but the human brain seems to almost automatically seek a simple regularity, the beat, or pulse, which can serve to organize our movements (as in dance, or tapping your foot to music), but also can organize our perception of time (Hannon, Snyder, Eerola, & Krumhansl, 2004;Palmer & Krumhansl, 1990). Two types of timing that are involved in rhythm perception are intervalbased (absolute) timing and beat-based (relative) timing (Dalla Bella et al, 2016;Grube, Lee, Griffiths, Barker, & Woodruff, 2010;Iversen & Balasubramaniam, 2016). Interval-based timing is common to humans and non-human primates (Merchant & Honing, 2014;Zarco, Merchant, Prado, & Mendez, 2009).…”

The Evolution of Rhythm Cognition: Timing in Music and Speech

“…Finally, new methods to model (van der Weij et al, 2017) and measure rhythmicity have been proposed, either quantitatively from data (Daniele, 2017;Malisz et al, 2017;Ravignani, 2017b;Ravignani and Norton, 2017) or as a test battery on human participants (Dalla Bella et al, 2016).…”