Universal and Cross-Cultural Variations in Audio-Motor Synchronization Between French and Indian Participants

How does a person's cultural background and prior experience with diverse rhythms of music and life affect basic sensorimotor skills? The present research investigated invariance and variations in synchronization abilities among French and Indian non-musician and non-dancer students. Participants were instructed to tap along to a regular sound sequence, whose rate was increased in a stepwise fashion. Relative phase variability and frequency mismatch did not show significant differences between the groups, indicating comparable levels of performance. Surprisingly, however, French participants exhibited a tendency to tap before the sound (considered ubiquitous in previous studies), whereas Indian participants exhibited a mean asynchrony close to zero. When synchronization was lost at higher rates, the frequency mismatch between movement and metronome showed that only French participants overestimated the metronome rate. To our knowledge, using an empirical geographic proxy assuming a causal role of enculturation, this study is the first to provide evidence for such similarities and variations in the basic ability to synchronize movement with sound. The fact that enculturation could affect functions as elementary as simple synchronization suggests the need for a more systematic development of comparative studies in the classic paradigms typical of the human sciences.