Critical review on the development and evolution of beat perception

Beat perception—the ability to extract a regular pulse from rhythmic sequences—is a foundational component of human musicality and a key mechanism supporting synchronization, dance, and collective music-making. Research across neuroscience, developmental psychology, and comparative cognition demonstrates that beat processing exhibits four defining characteristics: it is near-universal across human cultures, emerges spontaneously in early development, engages domain-specific predictive timing mechanisms, and appears largely species-specific. Neurophysiological evidence indicates that newborns, and even late-gestation fetuses, respond to rhythmic regularities using predictive neural processes that cannot be explained by simple interval timing or statistical learning alone. Across infancy and childhood, these early predispositions are progressively refined through auditory experience, motor development, and musical enculturation, ultimately supporting the flexible, hierarchical beat-based timing seen in adults. Comparative studies reveal that while non-human primates and other species can detect isochrony or local temporal violations, they typically fail to induce a beat, highlighting a dissociation between evolutionarily conserved timing abilities and the specialized predictive mechanisms characteristic of humans. Together, findings from phylogeny and ontogeny suggest that beat perception reflects an early-emerging, biologically prepared capacity that is further shaped by experience. Understanding its developmental and evolutionary bases offers crucial insight into the origins of human musicality and the neural architecture supporting temporal prediction.