Evidence for top‐down metre perception in infancy as shown by primed neural responses to an ambiguous rhythm

Abstract

From auditory rhythm patterns, listeners extract the underlying steady beat and perceptually group beats to form metres. While previous studies show infants discriminate different auditory metres, it remains unknown whether they can maintain (imagine) a metrical interpretation of an ambiguous rhythm through top‐down processes. We investigated this via electroencephalographic mismatch responses. We primed 6‐month‐old infants (N = 24) to hear a 6‐beat ambiguous rhythm either in duple metre (n = 13) or in triple metre (n = 11) through loudness accents either on every second or every third beat. Periods of priming were inserted before sequences of the ambiguous unaccented rhythm. To elicit mismatch responses, occasional pitch deviants occurred on either beat 4 (strong beat in triple metre; weak in duple) or beat 5 (strong in duple; weak in triple) of the unaccented trials. At frontal left sites, we found a significant interaction between beat and priming group in the predicted direction. Post‐hoc analyses showed that mismatch response amplitudes were significantly larger for beat 5 in the duple‐primed than triple‐primed group (p = .047) and were non‐significantly larger for beat 4 in the triple‐primed than duple‐primed group. Further, amplitudes were generally larger in infants with musically experienced parents. At frontal right sites, mismatch responses were generally larger for those in the duple compared with triple group, which may reflect a processing advantage for duple metre. These results indicate that infants can impose a top‐down, internally generated metre on ambiguous auditory rhythms, an ability that would aid early language and music learning.

The relation between rhythm processing and cognitive abilities during child development: The role of prediction

“…In a study by Phillips-Silver and Trainor (2005) it was demonstrated that infants' encoding of a meter could be influenced by moving them, indicating that they can already distinguish between a double and a triple meter. Moreover, a recent EEG-study by Flaten et al (2022) showed that 6-month-old infants can extract information about meter from auditorily presented stimuli and transfer it to an auditorily As already mentioned, rhythm production abilities develop later from early childhood on. A study with 5-to 37-month-old children indicated that children's spontaneous motor tempo (SMT) becomes faster with age, because they get better in the ability to make repeated, targeted movements.…”

Rhythm in the Premature Neonate Brain: Very Early Processing of Auditory Beat and Meter

“…Although rhythms often contain sound events of different durations, listeners extract a regular or quasi-isochronous pulse or beat, corresponding to how one would tap to the rhythm. Furthermore, listeners perceptually group beats (typically groups of two or three), creating a metrical hierarchy of tempos ( Penel and Drake, 1998 ; Trainor et al, 2009 ; Nozaradan et al, 2011 ; Lenc et al, 2020 ; Møller et al, 2021 ; Nave-Blodgett et al, 2021 ; Flaten et al, 2022 ). Behavioral studies show infants discriminate rhythmic patterns ( Hannon and Trainor, 2007 ); neural evidence suggests late premature newborns are already sensitive to rhythmic temporal patterns ( Winkler et al, 2009 ; Háden et al, 2015 ; Barajas et al, 2021 ; Edalati et al, 2022 ).…”

“…There is even selective neural enhancement to meter frequencies ( Nozaradan et al, 2012b ; Lenc et al, 2020 ). Behavioral studies show infants flexibly perceive metrical cues ( Phillips-Silver and Trainor, 2005 ; Hannon and Trehub, 2005a ), and EEG studies show neural entrainment to both the beat and metrical frequencies ( Cirelli et al, 2016 ; Choi et al, 2020 ; Flaten et al 2022 ; Lenc et al 2022 ). However, little is known about how early in development infants are able to process rhythms.…”

“…Here, we investigate to what extent rhythm sensitivity is already present in neonates born between 30 and 33 wGA, measuring high-resolution electroencephalography (EEG) in the incubator in the neonatal intensive care unit. In particular, we examine whether premature neonates encode different levels of the metrical hierarchy, as in older infants ( Cirelli et al, 2016 ; Flaten et al, 2022 ). To compare with 6-month-old infants, we used the repeating six-beat stimulus of Cirelli et al (2016) .…”

Intermodulation from Unisensory to Multisensory Perception: A Review

“…Although IMs are often used to study unisensory visual cognition, in recent years, unisensory auditory and tactile stimulation techniques have also been increasingly exploited to study object perception. For example, Flaten et al [ 3 ], using EEG IMs, found that infants were able to integrate top-down musical beats in the early 7–8 months, and the effect was stronger in children whose parents were musicians. Pang et al [ 4 ] used IMs based on steady-state tactile evoked potentials to study the spatial attention of touch; they found that when two closer fingers on the same hand received vibration signals with two corresponding, specific frequencies, EEG results showed that neural interaction can generate intermodulation components (IMs).…”