ArticleFrontiers in psychology2022
The sweet spot between predictability and surprise: musical groove in brain, body, and social interactions.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed, 47 citations in OpenAlex.
- Female Budgerigars Attend Equally to Rhythmic Beat or Repetition, While Humans Prioritize Their Combination.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Rhythmic Structure Shapes Dyadic Self-Other Representations Through Interpersonal Action Coupling.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Autonomic entrainment to expressive musical phrase structures.European heart journal. Imaging methods and practice · 2026Article
- The Lucerne Groove Library: An audio stimulus corpus of 444 short Western popular music drum and bass patterns with behavioural, structural, and audio measurements.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Continuous Theta Burst to Supplementary Motor Area Modulates Groove.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Embodied groove-synchrony model: movement context reshapes groove-synchrony coupling and its dominant timescale.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Four sources of pleasure associated with the experience of groove.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- The Impact of Dance-Based Physical Activity on Sensorimotor and Psychological Function in Parkinson's Disease: A Narrative Review.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Autonomic entrainment to music structure in Verdi opera.European heart journal. Imaging methods and practice · 2026Article
- The Development of Dance in Early Childhood.Current directions in psychological science · 2025Article
- Body maps of the sensation of musical groove.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Active Inference in Music Perception: Motor Engagement to Syncopation Modulates Rhythmic Prediction Error.Psychophysiology · 2025Article
- Individuals with substance use disorders experience an increased urge to move to complex music.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Multiscale synchronisation dynamics reveals the impact of an improvisatory approach to performance on music experience.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Beyond perfect synchrony: shared interpersonal rhythmic timing enhances self-other merging judgements.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Auditory Rhythm Encoding during the Last Trimester of Human Gestation: From Tracking the Basic Beat to Tracking Hierarchical Nested Temporal Structures.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Exploring differences between groove and catchiness.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Statistical learning across cognitive and affective domains: a multidimensional review.Frontiers in integrative neuroscience · 2025Review
- Music reward sensitivity is associated with greater information transfer capacity within dorsal and motor white matter networks in musicians.Brain structure & function · 2024Article
- Effects of Vibroacoustic Stimulation on Psychological, Physiological, and Cognitive Stress.Sensors (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Groove-defined as the pleasurable urge to move to a rhythm-depends on a fine-tuned interplay between predictability arising from repetitive rhythmic patterns, and surprise arising from rhythmic deviations, for example in the form of syncopation. The perfect balance between predictability and surprise is commonly found in rhythmic patterns with a moderate level of rhythmic complexity and represents the sweet spot of the groove experience. In contrast, rhythms with low or high complexity are usually associated with a weaker experience of groove because they are too boring to be engaging or too complex to be interpreted, respectively. Consequently, the relationship between rhythmic complexity and groove experience can be described by an inverted U-shaped function. We interpret this inverted U shape in light of the theory of predictive processing and provide perspectives on how rhythmic complexity and groove can help us to understand the underlying neural mechanisms linking temporal predictions, movement, and reward. A better understanding of these mechanisms can guide future approaches to improve treatments for patients with motor impairments, such as Parkinson's disease, and to investigate prosocial aspects of interpersonal interactions that feature music, such as dancing. Finally, we present some open questions and ideas for future research.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.