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DOI: 10.1055/s-2008-1060344
Exploring Individual Temporal Preferences
Understanding and producing motor and auditory sequences requires an accurately controlled temporal dimension. Interestingly, our everyday experience and research suggest that individuals differ both in their temporal motor pattern production and in their musical preferences. Various studies identified interindividual temporal differences in locomotion, goal-directed movement, as well as in speech patterns. Throughout the last century, there have been investigations of the relationship between musical preferences and personality, and in particular of the way, in which musical tempo is associated to age, sex, as well as to individual heart rate, breath, gate and tapping – the so-called “personal tempo“. Recently, several analytical, behavioural and neurocognitive studies provided evidence for a link between movement and auditory temporal perception.
Our studies explored the connection between individual preferences for different auditory temporal factors, personality traits and preferred stepping frequency in 30 healthy subjects using behavioural measures and personality testing. As suggested by the link between temporal aspects of movement and auditory perception, we found that the preferred stepping frequency is related to preferred temporal grouping of auditory patterns, which extends previous knowledge by the notion of intraindividual parallels in temporal preferences.
Additionally, the results point to a personality-based model of individual temporal perceptual and temporal motor preferences. Each aspect of individual temporal preference is related to a
specific range of personality factors and facets.