Media release

From: Springer Nature

Zoology: Sea lion better at keeping a beat than some humans

A Californian sea lion (Zalophus californianus) trained to move in time with a metronome can keep a beat better than some humans, finds a study published in Scientific Reports. The study is one of the first to directly compare human rhythm-keeping skills to an animal's and suggests the ability to keep time is not unique to our species.

While some mammals and birds have proved able to move in time to rhythmic cues in laboratory experiments, most vertebrates show little evidence of beat synchronization. However, Ronan, a 15-year-old sea lion from California, was trained to recognise and bob her head in time to the pulse of a metronome at three years old and retained this ability into maturity.

Peter Cook and colleagues assessed Ronan’s consistency and coordination in moving in time to the beat of a snare drum at 112, 120, and 128 beats per minute (bpm). The same sounds were then presented to ten undergraduate students aged between 18 and 23 years old who were asked to chop their hand in time to the percussive beat. The authors monitored the precision of the participants’ timekeeping through video tracking software, and found that overall Ronan’s timekeeping was more accurate and less variable than the human subjects. Ronan’s accuracy compared to humans increased with the tempo: at the tempo of 128 bpm, her performed average tempo was 129 bpm (± 2.94), while the average tempo of human subjects was 116.2bpm (±7.34). After the test, Ronan was rewarded with a toy filled with fish and ice.

As the study only assessed the time-keeping of one trained sea lion and ten humans, the reproducibility of these findings should be assessed through larger studies.