ArticleNature human behaviour2024
Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 41 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
41 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 78 citations in OpenAlex.
- Musical rhythm abilities and risk for developmental speech-language problems and disorders: epidemiological and polygenic associations.Nature communications · 2025Pooled it
- Cortico-striatal network architecture shapes rhythmic biases in music.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2026Article
- Critical Review on the Development and Evolution of Beat Perception.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Review
- Humans, but not zebra finches, produce spontaneously isochronous song through the lifespan.iScience · 2026Article
- Embodied Responses to Harmony and (Poly)Rhythm: An Integrated Ratio-Based Perception-Action Framework.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Review
- Music Is Quasi-Rhythmic Too: Comparing Bandwidth in Speech and Music Acoustic Modulation Spectra.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Polyrhythm Perception and Production: A Scoping Review.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Universal and Cross-Cultural Variations in Audio-Motor Synchronization Between French and Indian Participants.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- The Ontogeny of Vocal Rhythms in a Non-Human Primate.Developmental science · 2026Article
- One test, many tongues: Surveying language proficiency across the globe.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Exploring the Emergence of Organized Colouration in Paintings Through Cultural Transmission.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- Finding the groove in neural space.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- The neurobiology of human sequential signal prediction: Insights from language, music, and mathematics.Neuroscience research · 2026Review
- 4/4 and more, rhythmic complexity more strongly predicts groove in common meters.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Computational modeling of rhythmic expectations: Perspectives, pitfalls, and prospects.PLoS computational biology · 2025Review
- The Influence of Music on Mental Health Through Neuroplasticity: Mechanisms, Clinical Implications, and Contextual Perspectives.Brain sciences · 2025Review
- Hidden assumptions of integer ratio analyses in bioacoustics and music.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Collaborative rule learning promotes interbrain information alignment.PLoS biology · 2025Article
- Core systems of music perception.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2025Review
- Revealing rhythm categorization in human brain activity.Science advances · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
34 authors at 20 institutions in 17 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Music is present in every known society but varies from place to place. What, if anything, is universal to music cognition? We measured a signature of mental representations of rhythm in 39 participant groups in 15 countries, spanning urban societies and Indigenous populations. Listeners reproduced random 'seed' rhythms; their reproductions were fed back as the stimulus (as in the game of 'telephone'), such that their biases (the prior) could be estimated from the distribution of reproductions. Every tested group showed a sparse prior with peaks at integer-ratio rhythms. However, the importance of different integer ratios varied across groups, often reflecting local musical practices. Our results suggest a common feature of music cognition: discrete rhythm 'categories' at small-integer ratios. These discrete representations plausibly stabilize musical systems in the face of cultural transmission but interact with culture-specific traditions to yield the diversity that is evident when mental representations are probed across many cultures.
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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.