Rats Move to Musical Beat as Humans Do, New Study Suggests

The research undercuts a longstanding theory that the ability to sync body movements with musical rhythms is found only in animals that can change the sounds they produce in response to experiences. These so-called vocal learners include some birds, bats, elephants, whales, dolphins and seals, in addition to humans.

Since rats aren’t vocal learners but bopped to the beat anyway, “beat synchronization might be more widespread across the animal kingdom than previously thought,” said Juan Manuel Toro, a comparative cognition researcher at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona who wasn’t involved in the research.

“This is the kind of work that needs to be done if we are going to uncover the vast abilities that other species have to connect with the world that we’re not yet aware of,” said Nina Kraus, a professor of neurobiology at Northwestern University who wasn’t involved in the new research.

Dr. Kraus said the finding didn’t surprise her. “It may be they’ve had these skills all the time,” she said of rats. “It’s just been scientists who have been slow to measure them.”

Previous research looked at rats’ ability to perceive and move in sync with musical rhythms. But those efforts involved analyzing video footage of the animals’ movements, which are “too small to be captured by visual inspection,” said Hirokazu Takahashi, an associate professor in the University of Tokyo mechanical-engineering department and a co-author of the new study.

Dr. Takahashi’s research team played 60-second clips of the sonata at four different tempos. Data from the accelerometers showed that five of the 10 rats moved their heads in time with the sonata when it was played at its original tempo of 132 beats per minute, or bpm. The researchers also saw a similar effect when the sonata was played at 75% of its original speed.

“At first the rats wait and see, then they begin to move and then those movements get stronger,” Dr. Takahashi said, adding that only some rats move rhythmically in response to music. “Some humans show very large movements in response to music, but others are very shy,” he said. “There are a lot of individual differences in rats as well.”

At faster tempos—when the sonata was played at double and quadruple the original speed—the rats didn’t move much.

The rats also heard songs by Lady Gaga, Queen, Michael Jackson and Maroon 5. But the study focused on data collected when the animals were exposed to the sonata, which, according to Dr. Takahashi, has been widely used in other studies on rodent cognition and behavior.

The researchers also recorded neural activity in a different set of rats while exposing them to clicking sounds at various tempos. Using electrodes affixed to the animals’ brains, they examined the auditory cortex, a brain region that processes sound. The scientists found that activity there synced with the beat of rhythmic sounds with a tempo falling between 120 bpm and 140 bpm.

The research also included human study participants who listened to the sonata at the four tempos using headphones fitted with accelerometers. Like the rats, the humans’ movements synced most distinctly to tempos between 120 bpm and 140 bpm. That makes sense, according to Dr. Takahashi, as evidenced by the fact that popular music frequently employs tempos in that range.

“The study is interesting because it shows beat synchronization in rats, and more importantly, it shows that the preferred tempos for such synchronization are the same ones observed in humans,” Dr. Toro said. “This provides evidence for biological bases of musical preferences that are shared between humans and other species.”

Henkjan Honing, a professor of music cognition at the University of Amsterdam who wasn’t involved in the new research, criticized its methodology. The rats’ head movements may simply have been a startle response to certain loud passages of music, he said.

“They’re scared basically,” he said of the rats.

To prove that the rats are perceiving and syncing up with the beat, Dr. Honing said, researchers would have to show that the animals’ movements came a few milliseconds before the beats. “It should sort of be slightly early and a bit predictive,” he said, adding that the rats in the study reacted to the beat rather than anticipating it.

One convincing follow-up to this study, he said, would be if researchers slowly sped up or slowed the music during the experiment and examined whether the rats’ physical responses changed over time and adapted to a new beat.

Though the new study presents no evidence that rats can anticipate the beat, “that’s not to say that it doesn’t exist,” Dr. Kraus said. “It may be we just haven’t been clever enough to figure out how to measure it yet.”

Write to Aylin Woodward at aylin.woodward@wsj.com