Registered report investigates sensorimotor synchronization differences between finger and foot, indicating how rhythmic complexity affects performance.
Synchronizing our bodies to music is natural and ubiquitous, yet the way that it is typically studied – by tapping the index finger on a surface – is not, and its ecological validity is questionable. This registered report aims to determine whether sensorimotor synchronization (SMS) performance differs between the finger and the foot, an effector that more commonly moves to music. Participants will be asked to tap to the beat of commercially-recorded music of varying rhythmic complexity using either their dominant finger or foot. Using Bayesian mixed effects regression, we will assess whether these effectors differ in both their biomechanical variability (via the intercept) and their cognitive performance (via the slopes with rhythmic complexity).
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Spiech et al. (2025) studied this question.
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