Humans can perceive a regular psychological pulse in music known as the beat. The evolutionary origins and neural mechanisms underlying this ability are hypothetically linked to imitative vocal learning, a rare trait found only in some species of mammals and birds. Beat perception has been demonstrated in vocal learning parrots but not in songbirds. We trained European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) on two sound discriminations to investigate their perception of the beat and temporal structure in rhythmic patterns. First, we trained birds on a two-choice discrimination between rhythmic patterns of tones that contain or lack a regular beat. Despite receiving extensive feedback, the starlings were unable to distinguish the first two patterns. Next, we probed the temporal cues that starlings use for discriminating rhythms in general. We trained birds to discriminate a baseline set of isochronous and triplet tone sequences. On occasional probe trials, we presented transformations of the baseline patterns. The starlings' responses to the probes suggest they relied on absolute temporal features to sort the sounds into “fast” and “slow” and otherwise ignored patterns that were present. Our results support that starlings attend to local features in rhythms and are less sensitive to the global temporal organization.

中文翻译：

---

欧洲star鸟（寻常的八哥类）通过速率而不是时间模式来区分节律

人们可以在音乐中感知到规律的心理搏动，即节拍。假设这种能力的进化起源和神经机制与模仿性声乐学习有关，后者是仅在某些哺乳动物和鸟类物种中发现的罕见特征。节拍知觉已在声乐学习鹦鹉中得到证明，但在鸣鸟中却没有。我们训练了欧洲八哥（Sturnus vulgaris）进行两个声音判别，以调查他们对节奏模式中节拍和时间结构的感知。首先，我们训练鸟类对包含或不包含常规节拍的节奏节奏模式之间的二选一判别。尽管获得了广泛的反馈，但八哥仍无法区分前两种模式。接下来，我们探究了star鸟通常用来区分节奏的时间暗示。我们训练了鸟类以区分等时和三联音调序列的基线集。在不定期的探针试验中，我们介绍了基线模式的转换。star鸟对探针的反应表明，它们依靠绝对的时间特征将声音分为“快”和“慢”两种，否则会被忽略。