Laurel Trainor

McMaster University | McMaster · Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour

Rhythm perception and synchronization to periodicity hold fundamental neurodevelopmental importance for language acquisition, musical behavior, and social communication. Rhythm is omnipresent in the fetal auditory world and newborns demonstrate sensitivity to auditory rhythmic cues. During the last trimester of gestation, the brain begins to respon...

Purpose Music performance facilitates prosociality across many cultures and contexts. Interestingly, the relationship between prosociality and sensorimotor synchronization (SMS) has so far primarily been demonstrated in the context of in-phase synchrony with only a few mixed results for anti-phase coordination. In anti-phase coordination, participa...

Past research suggests that pitch height can influence the perceived tempo of speech and music, such that higher-pitched signals seem faster than lower-pitched ones. However, previous studies have analyzed perceived tempo across a relatively limited range of fundamental frequencies. To investigate whether this higher-equals-faster illusion generali...

Auditory rhythm perception involves bottom-up encoding of timing information and top-down maintenance of a particular interpretation. Beats in musical rhythms can be grouped to form metres, such as duple (two-beat groupings) or triple (three-beat groupings). Subjective (top-down) metre perception can be measured using electroencephalographic respon...

Please see the second version of this preprint here: https://doi.org/10.22541/au.172814927.73345976/v2

Over the past decades, the focus of brain research has expanded from using strictly controlled stimuli towards understanding brain functioning in complex naturalistic contexts. Interest has increased in measuring brain processes in natural interaction, including classrooms, theatres, concerts and museums to understand the brain functions in the rea...

Access to musical training depends on various factors, such as socioeconomic status and musical background of families, and the child's interest in learning music (related to their openness to experience). In the present study, we show an additional source of selection bias that has gone unnoticed: the relative age of children within the same cohor...

When exposed to rhythmic patterns with temporal regularity, adults exhibit an inherent ability to extract and anticipate an underlying sequence of regularly spaced beats, which is internally constructed, as beats are experienced even when no events occur at beat positions (e.g., in the case of rests). Perception of rhythm and synchronization to per...

The evolution of music, language, and cooperation have been debated since before Darwin. The social bonding hypothesis proposes that these phenomena may be interlinked: musicality may have facilitated the evolution of group cooperation beyond the possibilities of spoken language. Although dozens of experimental studies have shown that synchronised...

Current models of rhythm perception propose that humans track musical beats using the phase, period, and amplitude of sound patterns. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that pitch can also influence the perceived timing of auditory signals. We recently discovered an inverted U-shaped relation between pitch and subjective ratings of tempo...

Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder featuring deficits in motor coordination and motor timing among children. Deficits in rhythmic tracking, including perceptually tracking and synchronizing action with auditory rhythms, have been studied in a wide range of motor disorders, providing a foundation for de...

Clinical screening tests for balance and mobility often fall short of predicting fall risk. Cognitive distractors and unpredictable external stimuli, common in busy natural environments, contribute to this risk, especially in older adults. Less is known about the effects of upper sensory–motor coordination, such as coordinating one’s hand with an e...

Accurate time perception is crucial for hearing (speech, music) and action (walking, catching). Motor brain regions are recruited during auditory time perception. Therefore, the hypothesis was tested that children (age 6-7) at risk for developmental coordination disorder (rDCD), a neurodevelopmental disorder involving motor difficulties, would show...

Clinical screening tests for balance and mobility often fall short of predicting fall risk. Cognitive distractors and unpredictable external stimuli, common in busy natural environments, contrib-ute to this risk, especially in the elderly. Less is known about the effects of upper sensory-motor coordination such as coordinating one’s hand with an ex...

Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder featuring deficits in motor coordination and motor timing among children. Deficits in rhythmic tracking, including perceptually tracking and synchronizing action with auditory rhythms, have been studied in a wide range of motor disorders, providing a foundation for de...

Growing evidence is demonstrating the connection between the microbiota gut-brain axis and neurodevelopment. Microbiota colonization occurs before the maturation of many neural systems and is linked to brain health. Because of this it has been hypothesized that the early microbiome interactions along the gut-brain axis evolved to promote advanced c...

A growing body of research shows that the universal capacity for music perception and production emerges early in development. Possibly building on this predisposition, caregivers around the world often communicate with infants using songs or speech entailing song-like characteristics. This suggests that music might be one of the earliest developin...

Familial risk for developmental dyslexia can compromise auditory and speech processing and subsequent language and literacy development. According to the phonological deficit theory, supporting phonological development during the sensitive infancy period could prevent or ameliorate future dyslexic symptoms. Music is an established method for suppor...

Rhythmicity permeates large parts of human experience. Humans generate various motor and brain rhythms spanning a range of frequencies. We also experience and synchronize to externally imposed rhythmicity, for example from music and song or from the 24-h light-dark cycles of the sun. In the context of music, humans have the ability to perceive, gen...

Electroencephalography measures are of interest in developmental neuroscience as potentially reliable clinical markers of brain function. Features extracted from electroencephalography are most often averaged across individuals in a population with a particular condition and compared statistically to the mean of a typically developing group, or a g...

A growing body of research shows that the universal capacity for music perception and production emerges early in development. Possibly building on this predisposition, caregivers around the world often communicate with infants using songs or speech entailing song-like characteristics. This suggests that music might be one of the earliest developin...

Introduction In alignment with the World Health Organization’s (WHO) goal to provide comprehensive and integrated mental health services in community-based settings, this randomized control trial explored the efficacy of online group music therapy as a proactive intervention for reducing stress and anxiety in university students who do not necessar...

The ability to extract rhythmic structure is important for the development of language, music and social communication. Although previous studies show infants’ brains entrain to the periodicities of auditory rhythms and even different metrical interpretations (e.g., groups of two vs. three beats) of ambiguous rhythms, whether the premature brain tr...

Past research suggests that pitch height can influence the perceived tempo of speech and music, such that higher-pitched signals seem faster than lower-pitched ones. However, previous studies have only analyzed stimuli separated by up to two octaves. To investigate whether this higher-equals-faster illusion generalizes across the wider range of hum...

The urge to move to music (groove) depends in part on rhythmic syncopation in the music. For adults, the syncopation‐groove relationship has an inverted‐U shape: listeners want to move most to rhythms that have some, but not too much, syncopation. However, we do not know whether the syncopation‐groove relationship is relatively sensitive to, or res...

Recent research into how musicians coordinate their expressive timing, phrasing, articulation, dynamics, and other stylistic characteristics during performances has highlighted the role of predictive processes, as musicians must anticipate how their partners will play in order to be together. Several studies have used information flow techniques su...

Humans are social animals who engage in a variety of collective activities requiring coordinated action. Among these, music is a defining and ancient aspect of human sociality. Human social interaction has largely been addressed in dyadic paradigms and it is yet to be determined whether the ensuing conclusions generalize to larger groups. Studied m...

Does low frequency sound (bass) make people dance more? Music that makes people want to move tends to have more low frequency sound, and bass instruments typically provide the musical pulse that people dance to1. Low pitches confer advantages in perception and movement timing, and elicit stronger neural responses for timing compared to high pitches...

Does low frequency sound (bass) make people dance more? Music that makes people want to move tends to have more low frequency sound, and bass instruments typically provide the musical pulse that people dance to1. Low pitches confer advantages in perception and movement timing, and elicit stronger neural responses for timing compared to high pitches...

The ability to coordinate with others is fundamental for humans to achieve shared goals. Often, harmonious interpersonal coordination requires learning, such as ensemble musicians rehearing together to synchronize their low‐level timing and high‐level aesthetic musical expressions. We investigated how the coordination dynamics of a professional str...

From auditory rhythm patterns, listeners extract the underlying steady beat, and perceptually group beats to form meters. While previous studies show infants discriminate different auditory meters, it remains unknown whether they can maintain (imagine) a metrical interpretation of an ambiguous rhythm through top‐down processes. We investigated this...

Peer review aims to select articles for publication and to improve articles before publication. We believe that this process can be infused by kindness without losing rigor. In 2014, the founding editorial team of the Canadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease (CJKHD) made an explicit commitment to treat authors as we would wish to be treated ou...

The human auditory system excels at detecting patterns needed for processing speech and music. According to predictive coding, the brain predicts incoming sounds, compares predictions to sensory input, and generates a prediction error whenever a mismatch between the prediction and sensory input occurs. Predictive coding can be indexed in EEG with t...

Aesthetic experience seems both regular and idiosyncratic. On one hand, there are powerful regularities in what we tend to find attractive versus unattractive (e.g., beaches versus mud puddles).1, 2, 3, 4 On the other hand, our tastes also vary dramatically from person to person:5, 6, 7, 8 what one of us finds beautiful, another might find distaste...

An extensive literature has investigated the impact of musical training on cognitive skills and academic achievement in children and adolescents. However, most of the studies have relied on cross-sectional designs, which makes it impossible to elucidate whether the observed differences are a consequence of the engagement in musical activities. Prev...

Background Dance is a mind-body activity of purposeful rhythmic movement to music. There is growing interest in using dance as a form of cognitive and physical rehabilitation. This manuscript describes the development of GERAS DANcing for Cognition and Exercise (DANCE) and evaluates its feasibility in older adults with cognitive and mobility impair...

Both humans and some non-human animals (e.g., birds and primates) demonstrate bias toward simple integer ratios in auditory rhythms. In humans, biases are found for small integer-ratio rhythms in general. In addition, there are biases for the specific small integer-ratio rhythms common to one’s cultural listening experience. To better understand th...

Attention fluctuates over time. Models such as Dynamic Attending Theory propose that attention follows an oscillatory pattern that can be entrained by exogenous stimulations. Moreover, the passage of time itself when there is the certainty that the target will appear after an interval (i.e., foreperiod) can be used to support attention. As the prob...

Objective Developmental dyslexia is a reading disorder that features difficulties in perceiving and tracking rhythmic regularities in auditory streams, such as speech and music. Studies on typical healthy participants have shown that power fluctuations of neural oscillations in beta band (15–25 Hz) reflect an essential mechanism for tracking rhythm...

The evolutionary origins of complex capacities such as musicality are not simple, and likely involved many interacting steps of musicality-specific adaptations, exaptations, and cultural creation. A full account of the origins of musicality needs to consider the role of ancient adaptations such as credible singing, auditory scene analysis, and pred...

Humans are social animals who engage in a variety of collective activities requiring coordinated action. Among these, music is a defining and ancient aspect of human sociality. Social interaction has largely been studied in dyadic contexts. The presence of multiple agents engaged in the same task space creates different constraints and possibilitie...

This review paper discusses rhythmic interactions and distinguishes them from non-rhythmic interactions. We report on communicative behaviours in social and sexual contexts, as found in dyads of humans, non-human primates, non-primate mammals, birds, anurans and insects. We discuss observed instances of rhythm in dyadic interactions, identify knowl...

Rhythms are important for understanding coordinated behaviours in ecological systems. The repetitive nature of rhythms affords prediction, planning of movements and coordination of processes within and between individuals. A major challenge is to understand complex forms of coordination when they differ from complete synchronization. By expressing...

Millions of children are impacted by neurodevelopmental disorders (NDDs), which unfold early in life, have varying genetic etiologies and can involve a variety of specific or generalized impairments in social, cognitive and motor functioning requiring potentially lifelong specialized supports. While specific disorders vary in their domain of primar...

Anticipating the future is essential for efficient perception and action planning. Yet, the role of anticipation in event segmentation is understudied because empirical research has focused on retrospective cues such as surprise. We address this question in the context of musical phrase-boundary perception. A computational model of cognitive sequen...

Anticipating the future is essential for efficient perception and action planning. Yet the role of anticipation in event segmentation is understudied because empirical research has focused on retrospective cues such as surprise. We address this concern in the context of perception of musical-phrase boundaries. A computational model of cognitive seq...

Participation in extra-curricular activities has been found to associate with increased well-being. Here we investigated in a survey (n = 786) what activities university students at a Canadian university engaged in during the stressful COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in April, 2020, which coincided with a novel online exam period, and how these activiti...

This review paper discusses rhythmic interactions and distinguishes them from non-rhythmic interactions. We report on communicative behaviours in social and sexual contexts, as found in dyads of humans, non-human primates, non-primate mammals, birds, anurans and insects. We discuss observed instances of rhythm in dyadic interactions, identify knowl...

Objective The aim of this study was to determine the mechanisms by which Rhythmic Auditory Music Stimulation (RAMS) improves exercise among patients participating in cardiac rehabilitation. Methods 168 English speaking patients over the age of 18 years, were recruited from the Cardiac Rehabilitation and Prevention Program. Participants were random...

Accurate time perception is crucial for hearing (speech, music) and action (walking, catching). Motor brain regions are recruited during auditory time perception. Therefore, the hypothesis was tested that children (age 6-7) at risk for developmental coordination disorder (rDCD), a neurodevelopmental disorder involving motor difficulties, would show...

The regularity of musical beat makes it a powerful stimulus promoting movement synchrony among people. Synchrony can increase interpersonal trust, affiliation and cooperation. Musical pieces can be classified according to the quality of groove; the higher the groove, the more it induces the desire to move. We investigated questions related to colle...

Human movements often spontaneously fall into synchrony with auditory and visual environmental rhythms. Related behavioral studies have shown that motor responses are automatically and unintentionally coupled with external rhythmic stimuli. However, the neurophysiological processes underlying such motor entrainment remain largely unknown. Here we i...

Social bonding is fundamental to human society, and romantic interest involves an important type of bonding. Speed dating research paradigms offer both high external validity and experimental control for studying romantic interest in real-world settings. While previous studies focused on the effect of social and personality factors on romantic inte...

Accurate perception and production of emotional states is important for successful social interactions across the lifespan. Previous research has shown that when identifying emotion in faces, preschool children are more likely to confuse emotions that share valence, but differ in arousal (e.g., sadness and anger) than emotions that share arousal, b...

An extensive literature has investigated the impact of musical training on cognition and academic achievement in children and adolescents. However, most of the studies have relied on cross-sectional designs, which make it impossible to elucidate whether the observed differences are a consequence of the engagement in musical activities. Previous met...

Infants typically experience music through social interactions with others. One such experience involves caregivers singing to infants while holding and bouncing them rhythmically. These highly social interactions shape infant music perception and may also influence social cognition and behavior. Moving in time with others-interpersonal synchrony-c...

Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant...

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...

Regular musical rhythms orient attention over time and facilitate processing. Previous research has shown that regular rhythmic stimulation benefits subsequent syntax processing in children with dyslexia and specific language impairment. The present EEG study examined the influence of a rhythmic musical prime on the P600 late evoked-potential, asso...

Speed dating research paradigms offer both high external validity and experimental control for studying romantic interest, an essential form of social bonding. While previous studies focused on the effect of social and personality factors on romantic interest, the present study investigated whether romantic interest can be (1) predicted by dyadic i...

Previous studies indicate that temporal predictability can enhance timing and intensity perception, but it is not known whether it also enhances pitch perception, despite pitch being a fundamental perceptual attribute of sound. Here we investigate this in the context of rhythmic regularity, a form of predictable temporal structure common in sound s...

Expert musicians use a number of expressive cues to communicate specific emotions in musical performance. In turn, listeners readily identify the intended emotions. Previous studies of cue utilization have studied the performances of expert or highly trained musicians, limiting the generalizability of the results. Here, we use a musical self-pacing...

Joint action is essential in daily life, as humans often must coordinate with others to accomplish shared goals. Previous studies have mainly focused on sensorimotor aspects of joint action, with measurements reflecting event-to-event precision of interpersonal sensorimotor coordination (e.g., tapping). However, while emotional factors are often cl...

A live music concert is a pleasurable social event that is among the most visceral and memorable forms of musical engagement. But what inspires listeners to attend concerts, sometimes at great expense, when they could listen to recordings at home? An iconic aspect of popular concerts is engaging with other audience members through moving to the mus...

Infants and children are able to track statistical regularities in perceptual input, which allows them to acquire structural aspects of language and music, such as syntax. However, much more is known about the development of linguistic compared to musical syntax. In the present study, we examined 3.5-year-olds’ implicit knowledge of Western musical...