Testing beat perception without sensory cues to the beat: the Beat-Drop Alignment Test (BDAT)

Beat perception can serve as a window into internal time-keeping mechanisms, auditory-motor interactions, and aspects of cognition. A popular test of beat perception, the Beat Alignment Test (BAT), asks listeners to judge if metronomic probe sounds are on the beat of music or not. In theory, this judgment could be made based on an ongoing internal pulse or by comparing probe timing to local acoustic events like a bass drum. The current study proposes a new beat perception test that rules out the second possibility: The Beat-Drop Alignment Test (BDAT). In this test, participants must identify the beat in musical excerpts and then judge whether a single probe falls on or off the beat. The probe occurs during a short break in the rhythmic components of the music when no rhythmic events are present, forcing participants to judge beat alignment in the absence of local acoustic timing cues. Here we present two large (N>100) tests of the BDAT. In the first, we explore the effect of test item parameters (e.g., probe displacement) on performance. In the second, we correlate scores on an adaptive version of the BDAT with computerized adaptive BAT (CA-BAT) scores and indices of musical experience. Musical experience indices outperform CA-BAT score as a predictor of BDAT score, suggesting that the BDAT measures a distinct aspect of beat perception that is more experience-dependent. The BDAT may prove useful in future behavioral and neural research on beat perception, and all stimuli and code are freely available for download.