Henkjan Honing

• prof. dr
• Professor at University of Amsterdam

It was recently shown that rhythmic entrainment, long considered a human-specific mechanism, can be demonstrated in a selected group of bird species, and, somewhat surprisingly, not in more closely related species such as nonhuman primates. This observation supports the vocal learning hypothesis that suggests rhythmic entrainment to be a by-product...

We propose a decomposition of the neurocognitive mechanisms that might underlie interval-based timing and rhythmic entrainment. Next to reviewing the concepts central to the definition of rhythmic entrainment, we discuss recent studies that suggest rhythmic entrainment to be specific to humans and a selected group of bird species, but, surprisingly...

Musicality can be defined as a natural, spontaneously developing trait based on and constrained by biology and cognition. Music, by contrast, can be defined as a social and cultural construct based on that very musicality. One critical challenge is to delineate the constituent elements of musicality. What biological and cognitive mechanisms are ess...

Rhythm. What is it? We all have an intuitive understanding of rhythm: The term is used widely to describe temporal structures of any kind. These range from the rhythm of the tides, or seasons, the random - yet rhythmic - drumming of rain on our windowsill, to the movements of animals, heartbeats or breathing, or the captivating rhythm of a skilled...

Vocal production learning is a remarkable ability, exclusively present in a few mammalian species and three bird clades. Besides learning conspecific vocalizations, vocal production can also lead to integration of allospecific sounds in an animals’ repertoire. While parrots and songbirds are well known for their allospecific imitation abilities, st...

Vocal production learning is a widespread and remarkable phenomenon. However, the underlying mechanisms of allospecific vocal imitation are poorly understood. Parrots and corvids are well known for their imitation abilities, but imitation accuracy has not yet been studied across species in a comparative context. We compared imitation accuracy betwe...

The aim of this chapter is to give an overview of how the perception of rhythmic temporal regularity such as a regular beat in music can be studied in human adults, human newborns, and nonhuman primates using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). First, we discuss different aspects of temporal structure in general, and musical rhythm in particular...

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...

N ewborn infants have been shown to extract temporal regularities from sound sequences, both in the form of learning regular sequential properties, and extracting periodicity in the input, commonly referred to as a regular pulse or the ‘beat’. However, these two types of regularities are often indistinguishable in isochronous sequences, as both sta...

Music is a cultural activity universally present in all human societies. Several hypotheses have been formulated to understand the possible origins of music and the reasons for its emergence. Here, we test two hypotheses: (1) the coalition signaling hypothesis which posits that music could have emerged as a tool to signal cooperative intent and sig...

Zebra finches rely mainly on syllable phonology rather than on syllable sequence when they discriminate between two songs. However, they can also learn to discriminate two strings containing the same set of syllables by their sequence. How learning about the phonological characteristics of syllables and their sequence relate to each other and to th...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0229109.].

Newborn infants have been shown to extract temporal regularities from sound sequences, both in the form of learning regular sequential properties, and extracting periodicity in the input, commonly referred to as a beat. However, these two types of regularities are often indistinguishable in isochronous sequences, as both statistical learning and be...

Zebra finches rely mainly on syllable phonology rather than on syllable sequence when they discriminate between two songs. However, they can also learn to discriminate two strings of containing the same set of syllables by their sequence. How learning about the phonological characteristics of syllables and their sequence relate to each other and to...

Language and music are universal human traits, raising the question for their evolutionary origin. This chapter takes a comparative perspective to address that question. It examines similarities and differences between humans and non-human animals (mammals and birds) by addressing whether and which constituent cognitive components that underlie the...

This brief statement revisits some earlier observations on what makes web-based experiments, and especially citizen science using engaging games, an attractive alternative to laboratory-based setups. It suggests web-based experimenting to be a full-grown alternative to traditional laboratory-based experiments, especially in the field music cognitio...

The two target articles address the origins of music in complementary ways. However, both proposals focus on overt musical behaviour, largely ignoring the role of perception and cognition, and they blur the boundaries between the potential origins of language and music. To resolve this, an alternative research strategy is proposed that focuses on t...

This theme issue assembles current studies that ask how and why precise synchronization and related forms of rhythm interaction are expressed in a wide range of behaviour. The studies cover human activity, with an emphasis on music, and social behaviour, reproduction and communication in non-human animals. In most cases, the temporally aligned rhyt...

Humans perceive and spontaneously move to one or several levels of periodic pulses (a meter, for short) when listening to musical rhythm, even when the sensory input does not provide prominent periodic cues to their temporal location. Here, we review a multi-levelled framework to understanding how external rhythmic inputs are mapped onto internally...

This brief statement revisits some earlier observations on what makes web-based experiments, and especially citizen science using engaging games, an attractive alternative to laboratory-based setups. It suggests web-based experimenting to be a full-grown alternative to traditional laboratory-based experiments, especially in the field of music cogni...

Predicting the timing of incoming information allows the brain to optimize information processing in dynamic environments. Behaviorally, temporal expectations have been shown to facilitate processing of events at expected time points, such as sounds that coincide with the beat in musical rhythm. Yet, temporal expectations can develop based on diffe...

Music and language have long been considered two distinct cognitive faculties governed by domain-specific cognitive and neural mechanisms. Recent work into the domain-specificity of pitch processing in both domains appears to suggest pitch processing to be governed by shared neural mechanisms. The current study aimed to explore the domain-specifici...

Many foundational questions in the psychology of music require cross-cultural approaches, yet the vast majority of work in the field to date has been conducted with Western participants and Western music. For cross-cultural research to thrive, it will require collaboration between people from different disciplinary backgrounds, as well as strategie...

Predicting the timing of incoming information allows the brain to optimize information processing in dynamic environments. Behaviorally, temporal expectations have been shown to facilitate processing of events at expected time points, such as sounds that coincide with the beat in musical rhythm. Yet, temporal expectations can develop based on diffe...

A music researcher's quest to discover other musical species. Even those of us who can't play a musical instrument or lack a sense of rhythm can perceive and enjoy music. Research shows that all humans possess the trait of musicality. We are a musical species—but are we the only musical species? Is our musical predisposition unique, like our lingui...

Background Previous literature has shown a putative relationship between playing a musical instrument and a benefit in various cognitive domains. However, to date it still remains unknown whether the exposure to a musically-enriched environment instead of playing an instrument yourself might also increase cognitive domains such as language, mathema...

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...

Example of a rhythmic pattern used in the isochronous condition. [1_isochronous.wav].

Example of a rhythmic pattern used in the jittered condition. [2_jittered.wav].

Interdisciplinary perspectives on the capacity to perceive, appreciate, and make music. Research shows that all humans have a predisposition for music, just as they do for language. All of us can perceive and enjoy music, even if we can't carry a tune and consider ourselves “unmusical.” This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on the capac...

Interdisciplinary perspectives on the capacity to perceive, appreciate, and make music. Research shows that all humans have a predisposition for music, just as they do for language. All of us can perceive and enjoy music, even if we can't carry a tune and consider ourselves “unmusical.” This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on the capac...

In recent years, music and musicality have been the focus of an increasing amount of research effort. This has led to a growing role and visibility of the contribution of (bio)musicology to the field of neuroscience and cognitive sciences at large. While it has been widely acknowledged that there are commonalities between speech, language, and musi...

Background: Research on the effects of music education on cognitive abilities has generated increasing interest across the scientific community. Nonetheless, longitudinal studies investigating the effects of structured music education on cognitive sub-functions are still rare. Prime candidates for investigating a relationship between academic achie...

Despite differences in their function and domain-specific elements, syntactic processing in music and language is believed to share cognitive resources. This study aims to investigate whether the simultaneous processing of language and music share the use of a common syntactic processor or more general attentional resources. To investigate this mat...

Perception of a regular beat in music is inferred from different types of accents. For example, increases in loudness cause intensity accents, and the grouping of time intervals in a rhythm creates temporal accents. Accents are expected to occur on the beat: when accents are “missing” on the beat, the beat is more difficult to find. However, it is...

Temporal rhythm with 1 beat missing and 1 accent off the beat. (MP3)

Temporal rhythm with 1 beat missing and 2 accents off the beat. (MP3)

Temporal rhythm with 2 beats missing and 1 accent off the beat. (MP3)

Intensity rhythm with 2 beats missing and 1 accent off the beat. (MP3)

Intensity rhythm with 3 beats missing and 3 accents off the beat. (MP3)

Intensity rhythm with 3 beats missing and 5 accents off the beat. (MP3)

Temporal rhythm with 3 beats missing and 3 accents off the beat. (MP3)

Temporal rhythm with 3 beats missing and 4 accents off the beat. (MP3)

Intensity rhythm with 1 beat missing and 1 accent off the beat. (MP3)

Intensity rhythm with 3 beats missing and 4 accents off the beat. (MP3)

Temporal rhythm with 0 beats missing and 0 accents off the beat. (MP3)

Temporal rhythm with 2 beats missing and 2 accents off the beat. (MP3)

Temporal rhythm with 2 beats missing and 3 accents off the beat. (MP3)

Temporal rhythm with 3 beats missing and 5 accents off the beat. (MP3)

Intensity rhythm with 0 beats missing and 0 accents off the beat. (MP3)

Intensity rhythm with 1 beat missing and 0 accents off the beat. (MP3)

Intensity rhythm with 2 beats missing and 2 accents off the beat. (MP3)

Intensity rhythm with 2 beats missing and 3 accents off the beat. (MP3)

Example of the interface used during the online experiment. (PDF)

Temporal rhythm with 1 beat missing and 0 accents off the beat. (MP3)

Intensity rhythm with 1 beat missing and 2 accents off the beat. (MP3)

Dataset from both Experiment 1 and Experiment 2. Labels and descriptions can be found in the “readme” tab. (XLSX)

Hooked on Music (Burgoyne, Bountouridis, van Balen, & Honing, 2013) is a citizen science project developed to uncover what makes music memorable. The game consists of two stages: firstly, recognizing a song fragment, secondly, verifying that one actually knows that song well, by correctly singing along to it. Half of the time, the music actually co...

This editorial serves a number of purposes. First, it aims at summarizing and discussing 33 accepted contributions to the special issue “The evolution of rhythm cognition: Timing in music and speech.” The major focus of the issue is the cognitive neuroscience of rhythm, intended as a neurobehavioral trait undergoing an evolutionary process. Second,...

Enculturation is known to shape the perception of meter in music but this is not explicitly accounted for by current cognitive models of meter perception. We hypothesize that the induction of meter is a result of predictive coding: interpreting onsets in a rhythm relative to a periodic meter facilitates prediction of future onsets. Such prediction,...

We present a hypothesis-driven study on the variation of melody phrases in a collection of Dutch folk songs. We investigate the variation of phrases within the folk songs through a pattern matching method which detects occurrences of these phrases within folk song variants, and ask the question: do the phrases which show less variation have differe...