Have you ever had trouble taking in information in a noisy environment? A new study suggests that tapping your fingers in a steady rhythm could help you ‘tune in’ through the noise.
The researchers designed a series of experiments to uncover the role of movement in understanding speech, “building on the theory that the motor system is not merely an executor of movements,” they write, “but actively contributes to the integration and reuse of temporal information.”
Study participants, who were all native French speakers, listened to recordings of a person reading 40 sentences from a designated list, made more difficult to comprehend because of background noise.
The research team, led by psycholinguist Noémie te Rietmolen from Aix-Marseille University in France, ran three different experiments in this study, but the central findings came out of Experiment 2.
Each time a participant began a ‘block’ of audio comprehension they were instructed to ‘prime’ themselves before listening by either: tapping their finger rhythmically at their own pace; tapping along to a provided beat; listening (without tapping) to the beat; or simply waiting in silence for the talking to begin.
The researchers then assessed how well the participants took in information from the recordings, in terms of accuracy and speed.
Those who had been primed with a physical beat prior to listening to the sentences – either tapping at their own pace or in time to an audio beat – were significantly better at identifying the words they heard in the sentence.
“These findings provide evidence for the functional role of the motor system in processing the temporal dynamics of naturalistic speech,” the authors conclude.
So if you’re struggling to hear your date over the rowdy table next to you at the restaurant, why not give it a try?
This research was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
