Linear and nonlinear aspects of sensorimotor synchronization

M. L. BAVASSI; R. LAJE

Congreso; International Society for Comparative Psychology, 14th. Biennial Meeting; 2008

Animals developed multiple timing mechanisms on scales that range more than 10 orders of magnitude, from microseconds to days. We focus on timing in the range of tens tohundreds of milliseconds, where many forms of sensory and motor processing occur –most notably speech and music recognition and production, and fine motor coordination.Sensorimotor synchronization, a robust and spontaneous behavior specific to humans, occurs within this range. Finger tapping experiments are usually performed to probe themechanism in charge of keeping average synchrony. We first review the literature on finger tapping time series (both isochronous and perturbations) in search of dynamicalconstraints to a model for the error correction mechanism. We propose a dynamical framework to interpret the qualitative features found in the reviewed time series. Based onthe qualitative constraints found, we propose an informed mathematical model for the error correction mechanism and put forward several predictions.