Auditory, tactile and bimodal synchronization to the beat: a test of the auditory-motor enhancement hypothesis
Abstract
Previous tapping studies have suggested that auditory-motor coupling is more robust than visual-motor coupling in the context of rhythmic processing. Does the auditory advantage persist for other modalities? In the current study, nonmusicians were asked to tap their finger to the beat of auditory, tactile, and bimodal metronomes. Stimulus magnitude and rhythmic complexity were also manipulated. In conditions involving a large area of stimulation and simple rhythmic sequences, tactile synchronization closely matched auditory. Although this finding shows a limitation to the hypothesis of enhanced auditory-motor coupling for rhythmic processing, other findings clearly support it. First, there was a robust advantage with auditory information for synchronization with complex rhythm sequences; moreover, in complex sequences a measure of error correction was found only when auditory information was present. Second, higher order grouping was evident only when auditory information was present.
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