A paper co-authored by Dr Andrew Welchman, and published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B earlier this week, has caught the attention of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4.
The paper presents the findings of a study that investigated how participants synchronized their movements when given potentially conflicting 'beat' sounds to tap along to. The paper proposes a new model that predicts whether people integrate beat sounds together or keep them separated. This skill of presenting two beats that are heard as one is the art of the successful beatmatching DJ. The paper's authors demonstrate that a Bayesian inference process can explain the situations in which participants choose to integrate or separate signals, and it predicts motor timing errors.
The model may provide clues as to why groups of people sometimes start moving in synchrony. This phenomenon can have potentially serious implications for the safety of structures - a famous example being London's wobbly Millennium footbridge.
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- Details of the article (which is open access): Mark T. Elliott, Alan M. Wing, and Andrew E. Welchman. Moving in time: Bayesian causal inference explains movement coordination to auditory beats Proc R Soc B 2014 281: 20140751.