Abstract
Rhythmic entrainment, or beat synchronization, provides an opportunity to understand how multiple systems operate together to integrate sensory-motor information. Also, synchronization is an essential component of musical performance that may be enhanced through musical training. Investigations of rhythmic entrainment have revealed a developmental trajectory across the lifespan, showing synchronization improves with age and musical experience. Here, we explore the development and maintenance of synchronization in childhood through older adulthood in a large cohort of participants (N = 145), and also ask how it may be altered by musical experience. We employed a uniform assessment of beat synchronization for all participants and compared performance developmentally and between individuals with and without musical experience. We show that the ability to consistently tap along to a beat improves with age into adulthood, yet in older adulthood tapping performance becomes more variable. Also, from childhood into young adulthood, individuals are able to tap increasingly close to the beat (i.e., asynchronies decline with age), however, this trend reverses from younger into older adulthood. There is a positive association between proportion of life spent playing music and tapping performance, which suggests a link between musical experience and auditory-motor integration. These results are broadly consistent with previous investigations into the development of beat synchronization across the lifespan, and thus complement existing studies and present new insights offered by a different, large cross-sectional sample.
Highlights
Spontaneous movement to a rhythmic beat, whether it be foot tapping to music or dancing, is a natural human behavior [1,2,3,4,5]
We assessed paced synchronization to a beat across a wide age span and examined how having previous musical experience relates to performance
We found that the ability to move consistently to a beat improves across the lifespan into middle adulthood, yet in older adulthood, slightly declines
Summary
Spontaneous movement to a rhythmic beat, whether it be foot tapping to music or dancing, is a natural human behavior [1,2,3,4,5]. McAuley and colleagues (2006) investigated perceptualmotor timing tasks in 305 individuals, ranging from age 4 to age 95, and found different developmental profiles for the age groups; Drewing and colleagues (2006) tested the synchronization ability of 286 participants, ages 6–88 years, and found that performance improves in childhood and is relatively stable until old age. These studies provide evidence indicating across the lifespan, sensorimotor integration changes with age, and in older age, synchronization may be a unique window to understand how sensorimotor integration slows. We predicted that synchronization improves into adulthood but becomes more variable in older adulthood, and that musical experience tracks with greater synchronization abilities throughout life
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