A system of personal computer control programs for tapping experiments.

A system of control and measuring programs on IBM-PC or compatible computers was developed to explore the precision and accuracy of a subject's timing mechanisms in sensorimotor behavior. Various rhythmic patterns composed of several accentuated and non-accentuated tones which the subject has to follow or to reproduce by finger tapping can be designed. All parameters of the stimulus tones, i.e., duration, pitch and inter-tone pause, in a pattern are variable. Two parallel, independent responses can be monitored simultaneously as well. In this way, the mutual influence of responses of two subjects or two responses of one subject can be analyzed. The programs are written in MODULA-2, the output data are in the ASCII format and can be processed by any common statistical package.