Abstract
Why do some people have problems “feeling the beat”? Here we investigate participants with congenital impairments in musical rhythm perception and production. A web-based version of the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia was used to screen for difficulties with rhythmic processing in a large sample and we identified three “dysrhythmic” individuals who scored below cut-off for the rhythm subtest, but not the pitch-based subtests. Follow-up testing in the laboratory was conducted to characterize the nature of both rhythm perception and production deficits in these dysrhythmic individuals. We found that they differed from control participants when required to synchronize their tapping to an external stimulus with a metrical pulse, but not when required to tap spontaneously (with no external stimulus) or to tap in time to an isochronous stimulus. Dysrhythmics exhibited a general tendency to tap at half the expected tempo when asked to synchronize to the beat of strongly metrical rhythms. These results suggest that the individuals studied here did not have motor production problems, but suffer from a selective rhythm perception deficit that influences the ability to entrain to metrical rhythms.
Highlights
Scores on the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA) are given in Table 2 and demonstrate that dysrhythmic participants were scoring below threshold for rhythm subtests but above threshold for pitch subtests
The dysrhythmic participants studied here did not demonstrate a general problem with spontaneous tapping, indicating that these individuals are unlikely to suffer from motor deficits that could explain synchronization performance
Their difficulties with tapping along to the beat of different types of rhythm are likely to relate to issues with extracting rhythmic information. Both rhythm perception and production tasks revealed anomalies relative to the performance of the controls, including both an impairment in musical rhythm perception, measured via the MBEA, and abnormal tapping behavior when required to extract the beat from a rhythmic sequence
Summary
Rhythm perception and entrainment abilities develop early in human life (Hannon and Trehub, 2005; Phillips-Silver and Trainor, 2005; Zentner and Eerola, 2010) and have been suggested to be relevant to a range of functions, including mother–infant communication (Beebe and Lachmann, 1988; Bernieri et al, 1988; Dissanayake, 2000), speech and language development (Smith et al, 1989; Jusczyk et al, 1992, 1999; Huss et al, 2011; Grube et al, 2012), and social bonding (Knoblich et al, 2011). In the present study we sought out individuals who exhibited specific impairments in rhythm perception according to the MBEA (administered on-line) and self-reported difficulties with rhythm in everyday life. These individuals, whom we subsequently refer to as “dysrhythmic” were tested to assess their ability to produce an isochronous tapping pulse (i) spontaneously, (ii) in time to isochronous stimulus sequences, and (iii) to sequences with strongly and weakly metrical-beats. In order to investigate the impact of pitch on these synchronization abilities, all three types of sequence were presented with and without pitch variation
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