Honing Henkjan, Bouwer Fleur L, Prado Luis, Merchant Hugo
Amsterdam Brain and Cognition, Institute for Advanced Study, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Department of Cognitive Neuroscience, Instituto de Neurobiología, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, Santiago de Querétaro, Mexico.
Front Neurosci. 2018 Jul 16;12:475. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2018.00475. eCollection 2018.
Charles Darwin suggested the perception of rhythm to be common to all animals. While only recently experimental research is finding some support for this claim, there are also aspects of rhythm cognition that appear to be species-specific, such as the capability to perceive a regular pulse (or beat) in a varying rhythm. In the current study, using EEG, we adapted an auditory oddball paradigm that allows for disentangling the contributions of beat perception and isochrony to the temporal predictability of the stimulus. We presented two rhesus monkeys () with a rhythmic sequence in two versions: an isochronous version, that was acoustically accented such that it could induce a duple meter (like a march), and a jittered version using the same acoustically accented sequence but that was presented in a randomly timed fashion, as such disabling beat induction. The results reveal that monkeys are sensitive to the isochrony of the stimulus, but not its metrical structure. The MMN was influenced by the isochrony of the stimulus, resulting in a larger MMN in the isochronous as opposed to the jittered condition. However, the MMN for both monkeys showed no interaction between metrical position and isochrony. So, while the monkey brain appears to be sensitive to the isochrony of the stimulus, we find no evidence in support of beat perception. We discuss these results in the context of the gradual audiomotor evolution (GAE) hypothesis (Merchant and Honing, 2014) that suggests beat-based timing to be omnipresent in humans but only weakly so or absent in non-human primates.
查尔斯·达尔文认为对节奏的感知是所有动物共有的。虽然直到最近实验研究才为这一说法找到一些支持，但节奏认知的某些方面似乎是物种特有的，比如在变化的节奏中感知规律脉搏（或节拍）的能力。在当前的研究中，我们使用脑电图（EEG），采用了一种听觉奇偶数范式，该范式能够区分节拍感知和等时性对刺激时间可预测性的贡献。我们向两只恒河猴展示了一个节奏序列的两个版本：一个等时版本，该版本在听觉上有重音，以便能诱导出二拍节奏（像进行曲），以及一个抖动版本，它使用相同的有听觉重音的序列，但以随机定时的方式呈现，从而无法诱导节拍。结果表明，猴子对刺激的等时性敏感，但对其节拍结构不敏感。失匹配负波（MMN）受刺激等时性的影响，在等时条件下产生的MMN比抖动条件下更大。然而，两只猴子的MMN在节拍位置和等时性之间均未表现出相互作用。所以，虽然猴子的大脑似乎对刺激的等时性敏感，但我们没有发现支持节拍感知的证据。我们在渐进听觉运动进化（GAE）假说（Merchant和Honing，2014）的背景下讨论这些结果，该假说认为基于节拍的时间安排在人类中无处不在，但在非人类灵长类动物中则很弱或不存在。
