Relationships between finger tapping and gait timing in musicians and non-musicians

The ability to produce motor tasks with precise timing is crucial for many human activities. Motor timing is often measured as the variations in time between consecutive motor outputs. Many studies have shown that finger tapping, gait and speech variability are correlated in people with Parkinson’s Disease. Another study found that a positive response to ‘walk with music’ training was predicted by the synchronization performance in hand tapping. These findings lead to the general hypothesis that motor timing is correlated across effectors. From this I will test the hypothesis that musicians, who present better ‘basic’ motor timing (finger tapping), will also present better gait timing (i.e., time intervals between consecutive gait cycles). For this study, 45 people ranging from 19-50 years old will be recruited. They will be recruited based on their musical training and be placed in one of three categories accordingly. Participants will then perform four finger tapping and four walking trials. For both the finger tapping and the walking trials, the four trials will be: 1) self-paced (tap or walk around the track at a comfortable pace without metronomes); 2) synchronization-continuation (SC) at preferred frequency (tap or walk in time with a metronome set at their preferred frequency, which was found in the self-paced task, and continue to tap or walk at this speed when the metronome stops); 3) SC at a faster frequency (30% faster than preferred tapping or walking rhythm); and 4) SC at a slower frequency (30% slower than preferred tapping or walking rhythm). The finger tapping synchronization-continuation tests will be used to confirm that musicians in our study have better basic motor timing than non-musicians. Each trial will be two minutes long and be repeated three times. The data collected will be analyzed to see how much their gait synchronized with the metronome. This will be done by analyzing the footswitches data to find the coefficient of variation (CV). The data will also be analyzed for timing “accuracy”, defined as the difference between the tap or stride interval and the target interval from the metronome. Accuracy will be used in the tapping and walking data to determine if they synchronized with the metronome in both series of trials. The CV of accuracy is to determine how much variation a participant had while synchronizing with the metronome