Neural correlates of rhythmic expectancy

Music and speech are behaviors in which complex sequences of events are exquisitely structured in time. Temporal structuring of acoustic signals is thought to have a profound impact on perception and attention, affording anticipation of when in the future important events are likely to occur (Jones, 1976). Pulse (beat) perception refers to the apprehension of a pseudo-periodic framework underlying the timing of events. The time scale of pulse perception is approximately 100-2000 ms (10 Hz–0.5 Hz), which corresponds to the range in which humans are most sensitive to tempo change (Drake & Botte, 1993; Friberg & Sundberg, 1995), sensorimotor synchronization is possible (Mates, Radil, Muller & Poppel, 1994; Engström, Kelso & Holroyd, 1996), and listeners tap with along with music (van Noorden & Moelants, 1999). Meter perception refers to the perception of regularity in accent or stress timing, giving rise to a sense of strong and weak beats as illustrated in Figure 1 (Liberman & Prince, 1977; Lerdahl & Jackendoff, 1983). It is well established that metric rhythms are easier to remember and reproduce than nonmetric rhythms (Essens & Povel, 1985), and that individual events are perceptually facilitated in the context of regularly timed sequences (Large & Jones, 1999; Jones, Moynihan, MacKenzie & Puente, 2002; Quene & Port, 2005). One influential theoretical framework for explaining pulse and meter perception is resonance: the response of an oscillation, exposed to a periodic stimulus, whose frequency stands in some particular ABSTRACT