Athletes Show Sharper Rhythm and Meter Skills, Study Finds

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The Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia, on which the present findings rest, has a long history as one of the most widely used instruments for characterizing individual differences in music perception. Developed originally by Isabelle Peretz and colleagues, the battery was designed not as a single index of musical ability but as a set of six independent subtests, each targeting a component that can be selectively impaired. The three melodic subtests probe sensitivity to the pitch content of a melody: Scale examines whether a note violates the key context, Contour tracks whether the direction of pitch movement changes, and Interval detects changes in the exact size of pitch steps. The two temporal subtests, Rhythm and Meter, dissociate the sequential patterning of durations from the underlying accent structure that gives rise to a sense of beat. Finally, the Memory subtest assesses recognition of previously heard melodies after a short delay, drawing on retention processes that support the other subtests as well. This architecture is precisely what allows researchers to ask whether an expertise-related difference is global or concentrated in particular processing streams, a question that aggregate scores alone cannot answer.

The distinction between rhythmic and metric processing deserves particular attention, because the two temporal subtests that yielded significant group differences in this study tap partly different mechanisms. Rhythm perception concerns the ordered pattern of event durations, and performance on this subtest can be achieved by representing the sequence of intervals between successive tones. Meter perception, by contrast, involves extracting a periodic pulse and detecting whether an accent falls in a metrically appropriate position, a process that requires the listener to generate an internal beat and match incoming events against it. Neuroimaging work has linked beat-based processing specifically to the supplementary motor area and the dorsal striatum, including the putamen, and studies of individuals with basal ganglia damage have shown disproportionately impaired meter compared with rhythm discrimination. From this standpoint, the finding that sport-trained participants showed advantages on both temporal subtests is theoretically meaningful: it suggests that their advantage is not limited to fine-grained duration discrimination but extends to the internally paced, predictive form of temporal processing that meter demands.

A plausible bridge between these auditory findings and the motor demands of sport is the action-perception framework of beat anticipation. According to this view, perceiving a beat recruits the same neural machinery that plans and times movement, even when the listener remains still. The dorsal auditory pathway, connecting temporal cortex to frontal and premotor regions, is thought to carry periodic predictions that help auditory cortex allocate processing resources to the moments when expected events should occur. Oscillatory evidence indicates that neural activity in sensorimotor cortex entrains to rhythmic input and exerts top-down influence on auditory regions, sharpening temporal selection. Athletes, whose training requires continuous anticipation of upcoming events, precise timing of interceptive actions, and coupling of perception to movement under pressure, might therefore develop or refine timing circuits that also support musical meter. This interpretation remains a hypothesis rather than a demonstrated mechanism, since the study did not measure neural activity, but it provides a coherent account of why temporal musical subtests, rather than pitch-based ones, would show group differences.

The selectivity of the observed profile is equally informative. No significant differences emerged for Scale, Interval, or Contour once correction for multiple comparisons was applied, meaning that the melodic dimension of musical perception showed no reliable group difference. This pattern aligns with a broader lesson from expertise research: transfer from one domain of training to another is typically bounded and structured rather than uniform. The meta-analytic literature on sport expertise shows that athlete advantages are largest for decision-making and sport-specific tasks and shrink considerably when tasks become abstract or domain-neutral. Similarly, comparisons of musicians and athletes in timing paradigms have revealed dissociable profiles, with each group excelling on tasks resembling the timing structure of their own practice. Against this backdrop, an advantage confined to temporal components of musical processing, with intact melodic processing, fits the expectation that adaptations shaped by sport training would express themselves most strongly in tasks sharing computational demands with that training.

The exploratory Memory finding adds a further layer of interpretation, though it warrants caution. The Memory subtest differs from the other five in that it requires retaining melodies across intervening silence and making old-versus-new judgments, integrating encoding, maintenance, and recognition. Because melodies heard in the preceding subtests share material with the memory items, performance can also be influenced by cumulative familiarity with the test format. A difference in recognition memory could reflect enhanced auditory working memory or consolidation among sport-trained participants, or it could reflect more efficient encoding of temporally structured material, given that the to-be-remembered melodies contain rhythmic organization. The authors label this result exploratory, and the d-prime analyses, which correct for response bias by considering hits and false alarms together, did support the same pattern, but replication in independent samples would be needed before strong theoretical claims about sport-related memory advantages could be justified.

The methodological choices in this study merit attention from readers seeking to evaluate the strength of the evidence. Instead of simple group comparisons, the authors used ordinary least-squares regression in which group membership predicted MBEA scores while age and years of formal musical education were held statistically constant. This is important because musical training is one of the strongest known predictors of MBEA performance, and any imbalance in musical background between athletes and psychology students could otherwise masquerade as a sport-related effect. The use of HC3 heteroscedasticity-consistent standard errors guards against inflated false-positive rates when residual variance differs between groups, a common situation in samples of modest size. Holm correction across the six subtests controls the family-wise error rate while retaining more power than a single Bonferroni adjustment, and it explains why an apparently sizable difference on Contour did not survive: with six tests, only the strongest effects can clear the adjusted threshold.

The supplementary signal-detection analyses strengthen the design further. Raw accuracy on a forced-choice task can be inflated by response bias, the tendency to favor one of two response options regardless of perceptual sensitivity. Computing d-prime separates sensitivity from bias, and the authors’ convergence between raw-score models and d-prime models, with leave-one-out resampling to check that no single participant drove the results, indicates that the temporal findings are unlikely to be artifacts of scoring choices or outlier influence. Such sensitivity analyses are not universally performed in behavioral expertise research, and their inclusion here raises confidence that the rhythm, meter, and memory differences are robust within this sample, even though the sample itself, drawn from a single institution, may limit generalization to other populations of athletes and non-athletes.

One result that complicates a simple training story is the absence of a positive association between years of sport participation and total MBEA performance within the sport-trained group. If accumulating hours of sport progressively sharpened auditory-musical processing, a dose-response relationship would be expected. Instead, the estimated slope was slightly negative and statistically indistinguishable from zero after adjusting for age. Several interpretations are possible. Longitudinal information about sport tenure may be noisy, since participants’ retrospective reports of when they began and stopped training are imprecise. The relation between dosage and benefit may be nonlinear, with advantages plateauing early in training. Most importantly, a between-group difference without a within-group dose-response gradient is consistent with the possibility that individual differences predating training, such as inherited timing ability or early-life rhythmic engagement, influenced both the choice to persist in sport and the performance on temporal musical tasks. Selection effects of this kind are notoriously difficult to disentangle from training effects in cross-sectional designs.

This ambiguity points to the central limitation acknowledged by the authors: causality cannot be established from a single snapshot. Three scenarios remain live. In the first, sport training genuinely reshapes temporal processing circuits that support musical meter, a form of transfer from motor to auditory domains. In the second, people with inherently better timing abilities are more likely to enter and remain in sport, so the group difference reflects pre-existing aptitude rather than adaptation. In the third, and perhaps most likely, both processes operate in parallel, with initial predispositions channeling individuals into sport and continued training then consolidating timing-related advantages. Longitudinal designs that track musical perception before and after the onset of sport training, or intervention studies assigning rhythmic athletic activity to novice participants, would be needed to separate these possibilities.

Future research could also refine the characterization of the sport sample itself. Different sports place very different demands on timing: ball sports and combat sports emphasize anticipatory timing of external events, endurance sports emphasize interoceptive pacing, and dance combines rhythmic movement with music directly. Prior work showing that swimmers and runners differ in time-reproduction tasks suggests that grouping all athletes together may obscure discipline-specific profiles. Recording the proportion of participants from rhythmic or anticipatory sport disciplines, and testing whether MBEA temporal scores vary with sport type, would allow a sharper test of the action-perception account. Incorporating movement-based measures, such as tapping to a beat or synchronization-continuation tasks, alongside the purely perceptual MBEA would further clarify whether auditory advantages co-occur with motor timing advantages within the same individuals.

Beyond its theoretical interest, this line of work has practical implications for performance science and education. If rhythmic athletic training does transfer to auditory temporal processing, sport programs might serve as ancillary contexts for developing timing skills relevant to music education, speech perception, and rehabilitation of temporal processing deficits. Conversely, if the association reflects shared predispositions, measures of musical rhythm perception might one day inform talent identification in sports that depend heavily on anticipatory timing. Either way, the study demonstrates that the reach of sport-related individual differences extends into a perceptual domain, musical listening, that on the surface shares nothing with athletic performance, and that the extension is structured rather than diffuse. The convergence of behavioral evidence, neurocognitive plausibility, and careful statistical control makes this selective profile a promising foundation for the longitudinal and mechanistic studies that must follow.

Subject of Research: Auditory-musical perception differences associated with long-term sport participation

Article Title: Long-term sport participation is associated with a selective auditory-musical performance profile

Article References: Long-term sport participation is associated with a selective auditory-musical performance profile. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1758520

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1758520

Keywords: sport participation, musical perception, rhythm, meter, temporal processing, MBEA, recognition memory, athletes, perceptual-cognitive expertise, auditory-motor coupling, Long-term, sport