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

Abstract

Rhythmic behaviour is ubiquitous in both human and non-human animals, but it is unclear whether the cognitive mechanisms underlying the specific rhythmic behaviours observed in different species are related. Laboratory 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 laboratory 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. By 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 behaviour. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Synchrony and rhythm interaction: from the brain to behavioural ecology’.

A silent disco: Differential effects of beat-based and pattern-based temporal expectations on persistent entrainment of low-frequency neural oscillations

“…Contrary to this notion, previous studies did find a CNV peaking at expected times not only for cue-based, but also for beat-based expectations (Breska & Deouell, 2012, 2017Praamstra et al, 2006). Importantly, the latter studies used isochronous rhythmic sequences to probe beat-based expectations, and therefore, memorybased expectations, be it pattern-based or cue-based, could also have been formed in response to these sequences (Bouwer et al, 2020(Bouwer et al, , 2021Bouwer, Werner, Knetemann, & Honing, 2016).…”

“…First, in the beat-based condition, it could be argued that participants used an interval-based strategy to perform the task, in which they predicted an event every 600 ms. However, first, patterns such as the ones used here have been shown to be indicative of beat-based processing in many neuroimaging (Grahn & Brett, 2007;Grahn & Rowe, 2009;Leow & Grahn, 2014), behavioral (Bouwer et al, 2018(Bouwer et al, , 2021Cameron & Grahn, 2014;Povel & Essens, 1985), and electrophysiological studies (Lenc et al, 2021). Moreover, listening to strictly metric patterns, as the ones used here, is associated with activity in a circuit including the basal ganglia, while listening to non-metric patterns is associated with activity in a circuit including the cerebellum, making it unlikely that the same, interval-based mechanism would be used for both types of rhythms (Leow & Grahn, 2014).…”

“…Contrary to this notion, previous studies did find a CNV peaking at expected times not only for cue-based, but also for beat-based expectations (Breska & Deouell, 2012, 2017; Breska & Ivry, 2020; Praamstra et al, 2006). Importantly, the latter studies used isochronous rhythmic sequences to probe beat-based expectations, and therefore, memory-based expectations, be it pattern-based or cue-based, could also have been formed in response to these sequences (Bouwer et al, 2020, 2021; Bouwer, Werner, Knetemann, & Honing, 2016; Breska & Ivry, 2016; Keele et al, 1989). Here, using a beat-based sequence that did not allow for expectations based on simply learning transitional probabilities, we did not observe the same negative deflection as in the pattern-based sequences.…”

Synchrony and rhythm interaction: from the brain to behavioural ecology

“…The two final articles in this section, focusing largely on non-human animals, point out how overlooking key biological factors has restricted our understanding of rhythm interaction. Bouwer et al [12] emphasize that synchrony is essentially a sensorimotor process, but find that very few studies address both royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rstb Phil. Trans.…”

“…The authors' approach has two main objectives: first, they propose that early intervention using 'rhythm therapy' may head off, or at least lessen, more severe problems expected to arise later. To some extent, the interventions are based on the notions that rhythm interaction in daily life is fundamentally a sensorimotor activity [11][12][13] and typically multimodal [14]. Second, determining the specific nature of these variants may improve our understanding of the neural and genetic bases of rhythm interaction in movement, language and musical performance.…”