Rats (Rattus norvegicus), like humans (Homo sapiens), detect auditory jitter.

One logical place to start in a wider search is to look for perception of auditory rhythm in diverse species. Celma-Miralles and Toro (see record 2019-59892-001), in this issue's Featured Article, report such a study. They tested whether rats and humans could detect deviations from one component of auditory rhythm, isochrony (a constant interval between sounds; Ravignani & Madison, 2017). Rats learned to poke their noses through an aperture, and humans learned to tap the spacebar on a keyboard, following an isochronous series of tones, and to refrain from these actions following an anisochronous series of tones (a Go/No go paradigm; Figure 1). In the anisochronic series of tones, the authors described the stimuli as having auditory jitter. Subsequently, the participants were presented with a mixture of familiar sound sequences and novel isochronous and anisochronous sound sequences at new tempi and with new absolute durations. Humans responded more than twice as frequently and rats just over 5% more frequently to the novel isochronous sound sequences than to the novel anisochronous sound sequences. Thus, both species provide evidence of discriminating jittery sounds from rhythmic sounds, and humans were more accurate at this task than rats. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).