Rhythmic categories in horse gait kinematics.

ABSTRACT: Anecdotally, horses' gaits sound rhythmic. Are they really? In this study, we quantified the motor rhythmicity of horses across three different gaits (walk, trot, and canter). For the first time, we adopted quantitative tools from bioacoustics and music cognition to quantify locomotor rhythmicity. Specifically, we tested whether kinematics data contained rhythmic categories; these occur when adjacent temporal intervals are categorically, rather than randomly, distributed. We extracted the motion cycle duration (t_k) of two ipsilateral hooves from motion data of 13 ridden horses and calculated the ratios from two successive t_k values. We tested whether these ratios significantly fell within rhythmic categories and quantified how close they were to small-integer ratios,

SUBMITTER: Laffi L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11828748 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature