Synchronization is better to a visual than to an auditory beat.

Daily music experience involves synchronizing movements in time with a perceived periodic beat. It has been established for over a century that beat synchronization is substantially less stable for the visual than for the auditory modality. This auditory advantage of beat synchronization gives rise to the hypotheses that the neural and evolutionary mechanisms underlying beat synchronization are modality-specific. Here, however, we found that synchronization to a periodically bouncing ball that was close to real-world moving visual experience was more stable than synchronization to an auditory metronome, demonstrating that humans can synchronize better to a visual than to an auditory beat. This finding challenges the auditory advantage of beat synchronization, and has important implications for the understanding of the biological substrates of beat synchronization. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015.