Relative Contributions of the Speed Characteristic and Other Possible Ecological Factors in Synchronization to a Visual Beat Consisting of Periodically Moving Stimuli

Abstract

Daily music experience involves synchronizing movements in time with a perceived periodic beat. Contrary to the auditory-specific view of beat synchronization, synchronization to a visual beat composed of a periodically bouncing ball has been shown to be not less stable than synchronization to auditory beats. The ecological relevance of periodically moving visual stimuli is considered to be essential for such synchronization improvement. However, multiple factors could be associated with the ecological relevance and the relative contributions of the ecological factors to the synchronization improvement remain unclear. The present study investigated whether ecological factors other than a proposed critical factor, i.e., the speed characteristic, are required to account for the synchronization improvement of the bouncing ball. A periodically contracting ring that had the same speed characteristic as the periodically bouncing ball but lacked other possible ecological factors of the ball was designed. The results showed that synchronization was more stable for the bouncing ball than for the contracting ring, and this stability difference was larger in the difficult 300-ms than in the comfortable 600-ms inter-beat interval tapping condition. The finding suggests that ecological factors other than the speed characteristic are required to explain the synchronization improvement of periodically moving visual stimuli, particularly in difficult tapping conditions.

Visual over auditory superiority in sensorimotor timing under optimized condition

“…The mean asynchrony difference in Sample 6 was significant [mean difference = -0.54, 95% CI = (-0.80, -0.28), t 59 = -4.39, p < 0.001, Cohen's d z = -1.06]. The results of mean asynchrony did not show consistent differences across data sets, consistent with previous results that improvement of visuomotor timing was primarily revealed by the measure of stability (Hove et al, 2010(Hove et al, , 2013aGan et al, 2015;Iversen et al, 2015;Huang et al, 2018;Mu et al, 2018;Gu et al, 2019).…”

“…Second, the visual information in our environments commonly contains spatiotemporal changes, whereas static visual flashes are the most often adopted visual stimuli in previous sensorimotor timing researches ( Repp, 2005 ; Repp and Su, 2013 ). Therefore, in a beat synchronization task ( Repp, 2005 ; Patel, 2014 ) employing moving visual stimuli with strong ecological relevance ( Gan et al, 2015 ; Huang et al, 2018 ; Gu et al, 2019 ), visuomotor timing should be substantially enhanced. The behavioral superiority of audition to vision in sensorimotor timing has been an essential basis for the proposed tight connections between the auditory and motor cortices but not between the visual and motor cortices ( Thaut et al, 1999 ; Zatorre et al, 2007 ; Patel, 2014 ).…”

Separating the effects of stimulus-gravity compatibility and stimulus-response compatibility on visuomotor synchronization.

“…Intervals for missing taps (i.e., there was no tap from the −1/2 to + 1/2 IOI interval) and multiple taps (i.e., there was more than one tap from the −1/2 to + 1/2 IOI interval) were excluded for calculating the stability and the mean asynchrony. Since the AC-1 is calculated with successive tap intervals, these excluded intervals were complemented by the average of the three previous and the three following intertap intervals (Huang et al, 2018).…”

“…If any condition had no or only one successful trial (out of the three attempts), the data of that participant were removed from calculating the mean asynchrony and AC-1. This exclusion criterion based on the successful trials was not used for calculating the stability because the stability itself can reflect how successful a trial is (Huang et al, 2018). In Experiment 1, all trials were deemed successful in the Rayleigh tests and were included in all analyses.…”

“…Compared with discrete flashing visual stimuli, moving stimuli contain rich spatial information, and several parameters (such as direction, velocity, path reversal) jointly determine the visual motion. However, the factors that affect visuomotor synchronization are not fully clear (Huang, Gu, Yang, Zhong, & Wu, 2018), and some evidence suggests that the direction of stimulus movement is relevant. Hove et al (2010) reported that the directional compatibility of stimulus movement and synchronized action influenced synchronization success (i.e., the percentage of trials that had stable tap-to-target asynchronies).…”