Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: Ariel Dario Silva | Email: arieldario.silva83@gmail.com
Ariel Silva1°3°, Rodrigo Laje1°2°3°
1° Laboratorio de Dinámica Sensomotora, Departamento de Ciencia y Tecnología, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes
2° Universidad de Buenos Aires
3° CONICET
Sensorimotor synchronization is one of the paradigmatic behaviors in millisecond timing, where both perception and production of temporal patterns are at play. A typical sensorimotor synchronization task is paced finger tapping. The task consists of tapping in synchrony with a periodic external stimulus, as when we follow the beat of music by tapping our foot. The differences between the occurrence time of each response and that of the corresponding stimulus are called asynchronies and constitute the most important observable to describe the synchronization phenomenon. Traditionally, finger tapping tasks include temporal perturbations with the aim of unraveling the underlying error-correction mechanism. These perturbations are made by modifying the external stimuli sequence (e.g. changing its period by a fixed amount), and the observed behavior is a resynchronization to a new baseline. In this work we go beyond the traditional fixed-size perturbations and perform adaptive perturbations where the stimulus period is dynamic and depends linearly on the previous asynchrony value. This manipulation causes the system to show solutions beyond the known and robust resynchronization, among which we can find bistable, unstable, oscillatory, alternating, etc. Preliminary results show that the error-correction mechanism is intrinsically nonlinear. Furthermore, all these results could potentially be explained as different aspects of a single underlying mechanism.