Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The ability to resolve timing differences within and between patterns is critical to the perception of music and speech; similarly, many motor skills such as music performance require fine temporal control of movements. Two important issues concern (1) the nature of the mechanism used for time measurement and (2) whether timing distinctions in perception and motor control are based on the same mechanism. In this paper, clock- and entrainment-based conceptions of time measurement are discussed; and predictions of both classes of model are then evaluated with respect to a tempo-discrimination experiment involving isochronous auditory sequences. The results from this experiment are shown to favor entrainment- over clock-based approaches to timing. The implications of these data are then discussed with respect to the hypothesized role of the cerebellum in timing.