Culture in psychology and neuroscience: Concepts, relevance, and empirical evidence in rhythm perception

Perceptual systems adapt through individual experience across the lifespan, an ability referred to as plasticity. To understand perceptual plasticity, a promising avenue is to investigate how perception is shaped by cultural experience, as a process deeply embedded within collective practices of cultural production and social learning. The current review synthesizes findings from recent behavioral experiments investigating cross-cultural variation in rhythm perception. Specifically, these studies show that fundamental perceptual processes, such as event timing and rhythm categorization, display shared features but also systematic differences across cultural groups. Critically, these differences correlate with statistically prominent and socially relevant features of cultural production, revealing how perceptual systems are tuned to their music-cultural environments. Yet, how can cross-cultural differences in perception be related back to the collective practices that produce the diversity of cultural environments in the first place? To bridge this gap, we propose perceptual niche construction as an evolutionary approach that positions culture as both a source and a product of perceptual plasticity. That is, cultural experience tunes individual perception, yielding culturally diverse perceptual processes. These processes, in turn, function as cultural selection pressures shaping collective practices across nested timescales, thus contributing back to the diversity of cultural environments in which perception is tuned. Notably, this approach has important implications for research in psychology and neuroscience: it operationalizes culture as communities of practice, highlights the relevance of contextually situated research, and accounts for the coevolutionary nature of culture-driven perceptual plasticity.