Subsymmetries predict auditory and visual pattern complexity.

A mathematical measure of pattern complexity based on subsymmetries possessed by the pattern, previously shown to correlate highly with empirically derived measures of cognitive complexity in the visual domain, is found to also correlate significantly with empirically derived complexity measures of perception and production of auditory temporal and musical rhythmic patterns. Not only does the subsymmetry measure correlate highly with the difficulty of reproducing the rhythms by tapping after listening to them, but also the empirical measures exhibit similar behavior, for both the visual and auditory patterns, as a function of the relative number of subsymmetries present in the patterns.