Beat perception in a non-vocal learner: rats can identify isochronous beats

Abstract

The origins of rhythm in music and language seem to be intertwined and may share evolutionary pathways (Fitch, 2006, 2013; Patel, 2006, 2010; Ravignani and Madison, 2017). The development of song in birds and speech in humans follows similar sensorimotor phases and parallel periods of vocal learning (Marler, 1970, 1976), an ability that allows animals to imitate and modify the vocalizations learned from other individuals thanks to specific neural connections (Jarvis, 2006, 2007). For the last decade, the vocal learning beat perception and synchronization hypothesis (Patel, 2006; Patel, Iversen, Bregman, and Schulz, 2009; Schachner, Brady, Pepperberg and Hauser, 2009) has been widely accepted among researchers, proposing that only vocal learners can extract and entrain to a periodic pulse. However, current animal studies reported beat entrainment (Cook, Rouse, Wilson and Reichmuth, 2013) and auditory synchronization (Hattori, Tomonaga and Matsuzawa, 2013) in not classically classified vocal learners, and non-human primates display some rhythmic behaviors in social interactions (see Merchant and Honing, 2013; Ravignani, Gingras, Asano, Sonnweber, Matellán and Fitch, 2013).