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Synchronization with competing visual and auditory rhythms: bouncing ball meets metronome

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Abstract

Synchronization of finger taps with periodically flashing visual stimuli is known to be much more variable than synchronization with an auditory metronome. When one of these rhythms is the synchronization target and the other serves as a distracter at various temporal offsets, strong auditory dominance is observed. However, it has recently been shown that visuomotor synchronization improves substantially with moving stimuli such as a continuously bouncing ball. The present study pitted a bouncing ball against an auditory metronome in a target–distracter synchronization paradigm, with the participants being auditory experts (musicians) and visual experts (video gamers and ball players). Synchronization was still less variable with auditory than with visual target stimuli in both groups. For musicians, auditory stimuli tended to be more distracting than visual stimuli, whereas the opposite was the case for the visual experts. Overall, there was no main effect of distracter modality. Thus, a distracting spatiotemporal visual rhythm can be as effective as a distracting auditory rhythm in its capacity to perturb synchronous movement, but its effectiveness also depends on modality-specific expertise.

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Notes

  1. For applications of the optimal integration hypothesis to cue integration in a multimodal synchronization task, see Wing, Doumas, and Welchman (2010), and Elliott, Wing, and Welchman (2010, 2011).

  2. Participants’ accuracy in those reports was considered satisfactory (92.3 % correct on average for musicians, 95.5 % correct for visual experts). One musician forgot to report the numbers but affirmed that she had watched the videos at all times; her data were retained.

  3. An approximation to the linear standard deviation (SD) can be obtained by first calculating the circular standard deviation CSD = sqrt(2 × CV) (Fisher, 1993, p. 33) and then, since we had previously calculated the linear SD for the nine Yale musicians, determining the exact relationship between CSD and SD by linear regression of the mean values of these participants. The equation turned out to be SD = 98.36 × CSD – 0.45, R 2 = 0.999. According to that formula, CVs of 0.02, 0.03, and 0.04 correspond to SDs of 19.2, 23.6, and 27.4 ms, respectively.

  4. It could be argued that the mean relative asynchrony for the 300 ms distracter lead/lag (this data point being duplicated at −300 and +300 ms in the figure) is a better reference because distracter effects should be minimal at the separation of half a cycle. With that reference, the distracter effects appear more nearly symmetric, but then it would seem that visual distracters exerted an effect at the zero lag, making taps occur later than they otherwise would. A possible reason for this could be that the point of subjective simultaneity of tones and ball bounces actually corresponded to a slight lead of the ball bounce, so that the bounces were perceived as lagging the tones when they were physically simultaneous (cf. Arrighi, Alais, & Burr, 2005, 2006; Petrini et al., 2009). A related possibility is that the real mean asynchrony (which we could not assess because of the video delays) was less negative (or more positive) for unimodal bounces than for unimodal tones, so the asynchrony shifted in the positive direction when the two stimuli occurred simultaneously. However, in the Iversen et al. (2012) study, the asynchrony for the bouncing ball was considerably more negative than for tones: −75 ms versus −8 ms.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant BCS-0924206 to BHR and by the Max Planck Society. The authors are grateful to Yi-Huang Su for helpful comments on the manuscript

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany

    Michael J. Hove

  2. The Neurosciences Institute, San Diego, CA, USA

    John R. Iversen

  3. Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Allen Zhang

  4. Haskins Laboratories, 300 George Street, New Haven, CT, 06511-6624, USA

    Bruno H. Repp

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  1. Michael J. Hove
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  2. John R. Iversen
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  3. Allen Zhang
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  4. Bruno H. Repp
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Correspondence to Bruno H. Repp.

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Hove, M.J., Iversen, J.R., Zhang, A. et al. Synchronization with competing visual and auditory rhythms: bouncing ball meets metronome. Psychological Research 77, 388–398 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-012-0441-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-012-0441-0

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