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Scaling Up Psychological Research in Music and Aesthetic Science 

MMB Projects Beat Synchronisation Experiments

Conducting research in the lab is time-consuming and costly. Consequently, lab experiments have typically suffered from a limited scale – e.g., small sample sizes, limited experimental manipulations - and generalisability – e.g., over-relying on Western university student participants, a rather unrepresentative sample. 

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Online behavioural research provides a promising way forward. Specifically, online research enables social and psychological experiments that would be nearly impossible in the lab by massively increasing the reach, scalability, and diversity of data collection. A key line of investigation in the our group is to develop paradigms capable to measure human behaviour using sophisticated production modalities online (e.g., tapping, singing, or speech), allowing us to run high-powered psychology studies with participants from all over the world.

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For example, we developed a new technology to run high-precision sensorimotor synchronisation (SMS) experiments over the internet, enabling the collection of SMS data from hundreds of participants around the world within hours (Anglada-Tort et al., 2022). This technology was crucial to contribute to the first GWAS on beat synchronisation with 606,825 participants (XXX). Using this technology, we also contributed to the first large-scale cross-cultural study on rhythm perception, including participants from more than15 countries (Jacoby et all., 2022). 

Publications

  • Anglada-Tort, M., Harrison, P. M., & Jacoby, N. (2022). REPP: A robust cross-platform solution for online sensorimotor synchronization experiments. Behavior research methods, 54(5), 2271-2285. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-021-01722-2

  • Niarchou, M., Gustavson, D. E., Sathirapongsasuti, J. F., Anglada-Tort, M., Eising, E., Bell, E., ... & Gordon, R. L. (2022). Genome-wide association study of musical beat synchronization demonstrates high polygenicity. Nature Human Behaviour, 6(9), 1292-1309. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01359-x

  • Jacoby, N., et al. (2024). Commonality and variation in mental representations of music revealed by a cross-cultural comparison of rhythm priors in 15 countries. Nature Human Behavior (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01800-9 

  • Harrison, P., Marjieh, R., Adolfi, F., van Rijn, P., Anglada-Tort, M., Tchernichovski, O., ... & Jacoby, N. (2020). Gibbs sampling with people. Advances in neural information processing systems, 33, 10659-10671.

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