Mechanism of Duration Perception in Artificial Brains Suggests New Model of Attentional Entrainment.

While cognitive theory has advanced several candidate frameworks to explain attentional entrainment, the neural basis for the temporal allocation of attention is unknown. Here we present a new model of attentional entrainment guided by empirical evidence obtained using a cohort of 50 artificial brains. These brains were evolved in silico to perform a duration judgment task similar to one where human subjects perform duration judgments in auditory oddball paradigms.

Auditory rhythm facilitates perception and action in children at risk for developmental coordination disorder.

Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder featuring deficits in motor coordination and motor timing among children. Deficits in rhythmic tracking, including perceptually tracking and synchronizing action with auditory rhythms, have been studied in a wide range of motor disorders, providing a foundation for developing rehabilitation programs incorporating auditory rhythms. We tested whether DCD also features these auditory-motor deficits among 7-10 year-old children.

Interdependence of movement amplitude and tempo during self-paced finger tapping: evaluation of a preferred velocity hypothesis.

This study examined the relation between movement amplitude and tempo during self-paced rhythmic finger tapping to test a preferred velocity account of the preferred tempo construct. Preferred tempo refers to the concept that individuals have preferences for the pace of actions or events in their environment (e.g.

Contribution of speech rhythm to understanding speech in noisy conditions: Further test of a selective entrainment hypothesis.

Previous work by McAuley et al. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 82, 3222-3233, (2020), Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 83, 2229-2240, (2021) showed that disruption of the natural rhythm of target (attended) speech worsens speech recognition in the presence of competing background speech or noise (a target-rhythm effect), while disruption of background speech rhythm improves target recognition (a background-rhythm effect). While these results were interpreted as support for the role of rhythmic regularities in facilitating target-speech recognition amidst competing backgrounds (in line with a selective entrainment hypothesis), questions remain about the factors that contribute to the target-rhythm effect.

Individual differences in neural markers of beat processing relate to spoken grammar skills in six-year-old children.

Based on the idea that neural entrainment establishes regular attentional fluctuations that facilitate hierarchical processing in both music and language, we hypothesized that individual differences in syntactic (grammatical) skills will be partly explained by patterns of neural responses to musical rhythm. To test this hypothesis, we recorded neural activity using electroencephalography (EEG) while children (N = 25) listened passively to rhythmic patterns that induced different beat percepts. Analysis of evoked beta and gamma activity revealed that individual differences in the magnitude of neural responses to rhythm explained variance in six-year-olds' expressive grammar abilities, beyond and complementarily to their performance in a behavioral rhythm perception task.

The effect of rhythm on selective listening in multiple-source environments for young and older adults.

Understanding continuous speech with competing background sounds is challenging, particularly for older adults. One stimulus property that may aid listeners understanding of to-be-attended (target) material is temporal regularity (rhythm). In the context of speech-in-noise understanding, McAuley and colleagues recently showed a target rhythm effect whereby recognition of target speech was better when natural speech rhythm of a target talker was intact than when it was temporally altered.

Differential sensitivity to speech rhythms in young and older adults.

Sensitivity to the temporal properties of auditory patterns tends to be poorer in older listeners, and this has been hypothesized to be one factor contributing to their poorer speech understanding. This study examined sensitivity to speech rhythms in young and older normal-hearing subjects, using a task designed to measure the effect of speech rhythmic context on the detection of changes in the timing of word onsets in spoken sentences. A temporal-shift detection paradigm was used in which listeners were presented with an intact sentence followed by two versions of the sentence in which a portion of speech was replaced with a silent gap: one with correct gap timing (the same duration as the missing speech) and one with altered gap timing (shorter or longer than the duration of the missing speech), resulting in an early or late resumption of the sentence after the gap.

Using Motor Tempi to Understand Rhythm and Grammatical Skills in Developmental Language Disorder and Typical Language Development.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) show relative weaknesses on rhythm tasks beyond their characteristic linguistic impairments. The current study compares preferred tempo and the width of an entrainment region for 5- to 7-year-old typically developing (TD) children and children with DLD and considers the associations with rhythm aptitude and expressive grammar skills in the two populations. Preferred tempo was measured with a spontaneous motor tempo task (tapping tempo at a comfortable speed), and the width (range) of an entrainment region was measured by the difference between the upper (slow) and lower (fast) limits of tapping a rhythm normalized by an individual's spontaneous motor tempo.

Exploring individual differences in musical rhythm and grammar skills in school-aged children with typically developing language.

A growing number of studies have shown a connection between rhythmic processing and language skill. It has been proposed that domain-general rhythm abilities might help children to tap into the rhythm of speech (prosody), cueing them to prosodic markers of grammatical (syntactic) information during language acquisition, thus underlying the observed correlations between rhythm and language. Working memory processes common to task demands for musical rhythm discrimination and spoken language paradigms are another possible source of individual variance observed in musical rhythm and language abilities.

Auditory rhythm discrimination in adults who stutter: An fMRI study.

Rhythm perception deficits have been linked to neurodevelopmental disorders affecting speech and language. Children who stutter have shown poorer rhythm discrimination and attenuated functional connectivity in rhythm-related brain areas, which may negatively impact timing control required for speech. It is unclear whether adults who stutter (AWS), who are likely to have acquired compensatory adaptations in response to rhythm processing/timing deficits, are similarly affected.

Using music to probe how perception shapes imagination.

Recent work using music highlights how past experiences and the immediate perceptual environment can shape imagination. Given that aspects of past experiences can be shared, depending on culture, as can the immediate perceptual environment, imaginings that might appear idiosyncratic or entirely subjective can in fact be broadly shared.

Genome-wide association study of musical beat synchronization demonstrates high polygenicity.

Moving in synchrony to the beat is a fundamental component of musicality. Here we conducted a genome-wide association study to identify common genetic variants associated with beat synchronization in 606,825 individuals. Beat synchronization exhibited a highly polygenic architecture, with 69 loci reaching genome-wide significance (P < 5 × 10) and single-nucleotide-polymorphism-based heritability (on the liability scale) of 13%-16%.

When did that happen? The dynamic unfolding of perceived musical narrative.

People readily imagine narratives in response to instrumental music. Although previous work has established that these narratives show broad intersubjectivity, it remains unclear whether these imagined stories are atemporal, or unfold systematically over the temporal extent of a musical excerpt. To investigate the dynamics of perceived musical narrative, we had participants first listen to 16 instrumental musical excerpts, which had previously been normed for factors of interest.

Narratives imagined in response to instrumental music reveal culture-bounded intersubjectivity.

The scientific literature sometimes considers music an abstract stimulus, devoid of explicit meaning, and at other times considers it a universal language. Here, individuals in three geographically distinct locations spanning two cultures performed a highly unconstrained task: they provided free-response descriptions of stories they imagined while listening to instrumental music. Tools from natural language processing revealed that listeners provide highly similar stories to the same musical excerpts when they share an underlying culture, but when they do not, the generated stories show limited overlap.

Do you hear what I hear? Perceived narrative constitutes a semantic dimension for music.

Music has attracted longstanding debate surrounding its capacity to communicate without words, but little empirical work has addressed the topic. Here, 534 participants in the US and a remote region of China participated in two experiments using a novel paradigm to investigate narrative perceptions as a semantic dimension of music. Participants listened to wordless musical excerpts and determined which of two presented stories was the correct match.

Effects of speech-rhythm disruption on selective listening with a single background talker.

Recent work by McAuley et al. (Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 82, 3222-3233, 2020) using the Coordinate Response Measure (CRM) paradigm with a multitalker background revealed that altering the natural rhythm of target speech amidst background speech worsens target recognition (a target-rhythm effect), while altering background speech rhythm improves target recognition (a background-rhythm effect). Here, we used a single-talker background to examine the role of specific properties of target and background sound patterns on selective listening without the complexity of multiple background stimuli.

Monkey see, monkey tap: mimicry of movement dynamics during coordinated tapping.

Common social behaviors, such as having a conversation, dancing, or playing a team sport, require precise interpersonal coordination of action. One question that emerges in research on interpersonal coordination is to what extent individuals implicitly mimic the spatial characteristics of movements for tasks that emphasize movement timing. To investigate this question, we conducted two experiments using an interpersonal synchronization-continuation tapping paradigm in which pairs of individuals tapped with their index finger on a table in synchrony with an auditory metronome and then continued tapping at the same tempo when the metronome stopped.

Altering the rhythm of target and background talkers differentially affects speech understanding.

Three experiments investigated listeners' ability to use speech rhythm to attend selectively to a single target talker presented in multi-talker babble (Experiments 1 and 2) and in speech-shaped noise (Experiment 3). Participants listened to spoken sentences of the form "Ready [Call sign] go to [Color] [Number] now" and reported the Color and Number spoken by a target talker (cued by the Call sign "Baron"). Experiment 1 altered the natural rhythm of the target talker and background talkers for two-talker and six-talker backgrounds.

Perceived duration of auditory oddballs: test of a novel pitch-window hypothesis.

Unexpected oddball stimuli embedded within a series of otherwise identical standard stimuli tend to be overestimated in duration. The present study tested a pitch-window explanation of the auditory oddball effect on perceived duration in two experiments. For both experiments, participants listened to isochronous sequences consisting of a series of 400 Hz fixed-duration standard tones with an embedded oddball tone that differed in pitch and judged whether the variable-duration oddball was shorter or longer than the standard.

Neural activity associated with rhythmicity of song in juvenile male and female zebra finches.

Rhythm is an important aspect of both human speech and birdsong. Adult zebra finches show increased neural activity following exposure to arrhythmic compared to rhythmic song in regions similar to the mammalian auditory association cortex and amygdala. This pattern may indicate that birds are detecting errors in the arrhythmic song relative to their learned song template or to more general expectations of song structure.

Social and Cognitive Impressions of Adults Who Do and Do Not Stutter Based on Listeners' Perceptions of Read-Speech Samples.

Stuttering is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by frequent and involuntary disruptions during speech production. Adults who stutter are often subject to negative perceptions. The present study examined whether negative social and cognitive impressions are formed when listening to speech, even without any knowledge about the speaker.

Cerebellar response to familiar and novel stimuli: An fMRI study.

Historically known for its key contribution to motor behavior, the cerebellum continues to break boundaries. Researchers have demonstrated the cerebellum also plays a role in learning, memory, and more recent evidence for contributions in language, attention, working memory, emotions, and social processes. Here, we present a study that adds to the list of nonmotor processes of the cerebellum.

Relation between functional connectivity and rhythm discrimination in children who do and do not stutter.

Our ability to perceive and produce rhythmic patterns in the environment supports fundamental human capacities ranging from music and language processing to the coordination of action. This article considers whether spontaneous correlated brain activity within a basal ganglia-thalamocortical (rhythm) network is associated with individual differences in auditory rhythm discrimination. Moreover, do children who stutter with demonstrated deficits in rhythm perception have weaker links between rhythm network functional connectivity and rhythm discrimination? All children in the study underwent a resting-state fMRI session, from which functional connectivity measures within the rhythm network were extracted from spontaneous brain activity.

How modality specific is processing of auditory and visual rhythms?

The present study used ERPs to test the extent to which temporal processing is modality specific or modality general. Participants were presented with auditory and visual temporal patterns that consisted of initial two- or three-event beginning patterns. This delineated a constant standard time interval, followed by a two-event ending pattern delineating a variable test interval.