Little Drummers study

Investigating rhythm perception in toddlers with an online experiment

Principal Investigator - Dr Sinead Rocha sineadrocha@gmail.com

University of Cambridge

Co-investigator - Dr Caspar Addyman c.addyman@gold.ac.uk

Goldsmiths, University of London

Version - Preprint March 2022

This repository holds code, data and documentation for a study of rhythm perception and generation in toddlers. We ask 2 to 2.5 year olds to bang on a table either with or without an accompanying tempo video. Experiment takes place in parents own home and is recorded on their laptop using the MIT LookIT platform.

This directory has several subfolders

• lookit - This folder contains files to run a web based study of rhythm perception in toddlers. The experiment runs on the MIT LookIT platform. To find out more about using this in your own research visit the LookIT documentation
• docs - Supporting documentation such as ethics forms, data sharing agreements (including GDPR)
• data - Anonymised movement data from the study
• analysis - A set of jupyter(python) notebooks that are used to convert video into movement data, then collate and analyse the data.

Experiment Walkthrough

Click here for a video walkthrough of the study.

About the analysis

The analysis was performed using the VASC toolkit, developed by Caspar. It is a freely downloadable, open source project for extracting human movement from videos and analysing rhythm, synchrony and causality. A tutorial can be found at the project homepage.

This study has recieved ethical approval from the Ethics Committee in the Psychology Department of Goldsmiths, University of London, September 2020.