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Recurrent arrangement of sounds into rhythmic patterns is a prominent component of human communication including musical behaviors. Converging evidence from behavioral studies suggests that humans internally represent the infinite space of possible rhythms in terms of a limited number of perceptual categories. Yet, the neural basis of this categorical perception, how it develops over the lifetime, and to what extent it is present in other species is far from understood. Here, we present a novel approach to capture categorical representations of rhythms from brain responses collected during passive listening. Distinct two-intervals rhythmic patterns whose interval ratio was equally spaced between 1:1 and 2:1 were presented to Western adult participants while their brain activity was recorded using electroencephalography (EEG). A behavioral index of the perceptual categories was obtained by asking participants to synchronize finger tapping with the same stimuli on separate trials. We used a combination of frequency-tagging and representational similarity analysis (RSA) to quantify pairwise similarity between individual rhythm exemplars, as captured in (i) the acoustic stimulus, (ii) the tapping responses, and (iii) the EEG responses. Preliminary results indicate that the tapping responses were distorted in a way compatible with a categorical model, as predicted by previous behavioral studies. Moreover, the data suggest similar categorical biases in the neural responses. Importantly, these categorical representations cannot be simply explained by physical properties of the stimulus. Rather, it reveals that the human brain nonlinearly warps the continuous space of two-interval rhythms to support categorical perception. Together, our new approach offers a way to capture neural representations of rhythmic patterns with high signal-to-noise ratio and without requiring an overt behavioral response. Hence, it opens new promising avenues to complement existing behavioral methods and generate new critical insights into the nature of rhythm perception.
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Barbero, F., Lenc, T., Jacoby, N., & Nozaradan, S. (2023). Capturing categorical representation of rhythmic patterns using electroencephalography. Timing Research Forum TRF3, Lisbon, Portugal. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/238374