WHO COULD ASK FOR ANYTHING MORE? MIXED MODALITY RHYTHMIC DISCRIMINATION APTITUDE IN HUMAN SUBJECTS

Is rhythm perception and its internal representation connected uniquely to the auditory system, or is it perhaps modality independent? This paper begins to explore the ability of human subjects to discriminate change in rhythms across sensory modalities to examine if a bias towards a given modality exists. In this psychophysical experiment, subjects were asked to compare two rhythms to see if they were exactly the same. The rhythms could be either audio (beeps over a speaker) or visual (a pulsed visual stimulus). Subjects could be asked to compare rhythms within and across modalities. There was no statistically significant difference in performance between the different modes of comparison, thus potentially indicating that the internal representation of rhythm in the brain is independent of modality. 1. METHODS