Dynamical Incompatibilities in Finger Tapping

This paper addresses a fundamental contradiction in the study of sensorimotor synchronization using paced finger tapping. It highlights that responses to different types of period perturbations (step changes vs. phase shifts) are dynamically incompatible when presented in separate experiments, leading to contradictory results in the literature. The key finding is that the temporal context of the experiment recalibrates the error-correction mechanism, making responses to different perturbation types compatible only when presented randomly within the same experiment. This has implications for how we design and interpret finger-tapping experiments and model the underlying cognitive processes.