Rhythmic abilities in humans and non-human animals: A review and recommendations from a methodological perspective

Abstract

Rhythmic behavior is ubiquitous in both human and non-human animals, but it is unclear whether the cognitive mechanisms underlying the specific rhythmic behaviors observed in different species are related. Lab experiments combined with highly controlled stimuli and tasks can be very effective in probing the cognitive architecture underlying rhythmic abilities. Rhythmic abilities have been examined in the lab with explicit and implicit perception tasks, and with production tasks, such as sensorimotor synchronization, with stimuli ranging from isochronous sequences of artificial sounds to human music. Here, we provide an overview of experimental findings on rhythmic abilities in human and non-human animals, while critically considering the wide variety of paradigms used. We identify several gaps in what is known about rhythmic abilities. Many bird species have been tested on rhythm perception, but research on rhythm production abilities in the same birds is lacking. In contrast, research in mammals has primarily focused on rhythm production rather than perception. Many experiments also do not differentiate between possible components of rhythmic abilities, such as processing of single temporal intervals, rhythmic patterns, a regular beat, or hierarchical metrical structures. For future research, we suggest a careful choice of paradigm to aid cross-species comparisons, and a critical consideration of the multifaceted abilities that underlie rhythmic behavior.

You got rhythm, or more: The multidimensionality of rhythmic abilities

“…These competencies can be measured with different types of tasks and are likely to be supported by different underlying neural mechanisms (Bouwer et al, 2020;Thaut et al, 2014). Based on such findings, theoretical work is beginning to re-categorize rhythmic ability as multi-faceted, with potentially distinct biological bases and evolutionary histories underlying different competencies (Bouwer et al, 2021;Greenfield et al, 2021;. With the aim to measure separable rhythmic competencies within an overall picture of competencies instead of investigating them independently (as in earlier research), we refer here primarily to two distinctions: performance measured by perception versus production tasks, and performance measured by sequence memory-based versus beat-based rhythm perception tasks.…”