SYNCHRONIZATION WITH BEATS IN DIFFERENT MODALITIES AND TEMPI

The current study compares synchronization with beats presented in various sensory modalities and tempi. Although beat perception and synchronization (BPS) has been studied extensively in auditory and visual modalities, relatively few have looked into and compared that in the tactile modality. We conducted an experiment in which participants had to tap in synchrony with fast (inter onset interval of 400 ms), middle (800 ms) and slow (1200 ms) beats that were presented either in single or in combinations of auditory, visual and tactile modalities. Preliminary results indicated that participants tended to fail in synchronizing with fast visual beats while they succeeded to synchronize with fast auditory and visual beats. This corresponds to the rate limits of visual BPS reported in previous studies. Although there was no significant difference between auditory and tactile BPS when beats were presented in a single modality, the tactile BPS performance was more influenced by the presence of visual inputs than the auditory BPS performance when beats were jointly presented in multiple modalities. Adding visual or tactile beats did not significantly influence the auditory BPS performance. These findings support the ideas that audition has a higher affinity for tempora