ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2020
Non-human animals detect the rhythmic structure of a familiar tune.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Review
- Core systems of music perception.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2025Review
- Harmonization of the fastest and densest responses reflects humanlike reaction time in mice.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2025Article
- Rats synchronize predictively to metronomes.iScience · 2024Article
- Do rats (Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Recognizing structure in novel tunes: differences between human and rats.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Detecting surface changes in a familiar tune: exploring pitch, tempo and timbre.Animal cognition · 2022Article
- Rhythmic abilities in humans and non-human animals: a review and recommendations from a methodological perspective.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The musical motives of a song emerge from the temporal arrangement of discrete tones. These tones normally have few durational values, and are organized in structured groups to create metrical patterns. In the present study we show that the ability to detect the rhythmic structure of a song, while ignoring surface changes, is also present in other species. We familiarized rats (Rattus norvegicus) with an excerpt of the Happy Birthday song. During test, we presented the animals with (i) the same excerpt of the familiarization, (ii) a constant-pitch version of the excerpt that reduced melodic intervals to only one tone (i.e., isotonic) but preserved rhythmic structure, and (iii) a rhythmically scrambled version of the excerpt that preserved the melodic intervals. The animals discriminated the rhythmically scrambled version from the versions that preserved the original rhythm. This demonstrates that rats were sensitive to at least some parts of the rhythmic structure of the tune. Together with previous findings, the present set of results suggests that the emergence of rhythmic musical universals might be based on principles shared with other species.
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Registered trials
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