Although much is known about musical preferences, they are still hard to explain and predict. Over the last two decades, scholars have suggested that the functions served by music should be considered when interpreting musical preferences. It is known that the degree of functionality and the strength of musical preferences are correlated. However, as correlation does not equal causation, the present study sought to clarify experimentally whether the degree of functionality really determines the strength of musical preferences. The potential of music to foster social relatedness was selected as one of the most basic functions of music and was at the basis of an experimental study. Participants indicated their favorite musical style and a favorite piece of music which they deemed capable of creating a strong social bond among devotees of that style. They were told that other devotees of the same style would subsequently be asked to rate-based on that piece-how much they would like to get to know the person who had named that piece and their degree of affinity for that person. False feedback was manipulated in two randomized groups: one group received very positive feedback from the other fans (suggesting high functionality of the piece) and the other received rather negative feedback (suggesting low functionality). At the end of the study, participants indicated how much they liked the piece they had named. As expected, participants in the high-functionality group gave higher preference ratings for their selected piece than participants in the low-functionality group. The results suggest that the degree of music's functionality in everyday life is a determinant of musical preferences.
When a person tries to press with a finger, other fingers of the hand produce force unintentionally. We explored this phenomenon of enslaving during unintentional force drifts in the course of continuous force production by pairs of fingers of a hand. Healthy subjects performed accurate force production tasks by finger pairs Index-Middle, Middle-Ring, and Ring-Little with continuous visual feedback on the combined force of the instructed (master) fingers or of the non-instructed (enslaved) fingers. The feedback scale was adjusted to ensure that the subjects did not know the difference between these two, randomly presented, conditions. Across all finger pairs, enslaved force showed a drift upward under feedback on the master finger force, and master force showed a drift downward under feedback on the enslaved finger force. The subjects were unaware of the force drifts, which could reach over 50% of the initial force magnitude over 15 s. Across all conditions, the index of enslaving increased by about 50% over the trial duration. The initial moment of force magnitude in pronation-supination was not a consistent predictor of the force drift magnitude. These results suggest that during continuous force production enslaving increases with time, possibly due to spread of excitation over cortical finger representations or other mechanisms such as increased synchronization of firing of alpha-motoneurons innervating different compartments of extrinsic flexors. These changes in enslaving, interpreted at the level of control with referent coordinates for the fingers, can contribute to a variety of phenomena including unintentional force drifts.
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