No abstract

No abstract

The version presented here may differ from the published, performed or presented work. Please go to the persistent GRO record above for more information.

In recent years, the field of neuroaesthetics has gained considerable attention with music being a favored object of study. The majority of studies concerning music have, however, focused on the experience of Western tonal music (TM), which is characterized by tonal hierarchical organization, a high degree of consonance, and a tendency to provide the listener with a tonic as a reference point during the listening experience. We argue that a narrow focus on Western TM may have led to a one-sided view regarding the qualities of the aesthetic experience of music since Western art music from the 20th and 21st century like atonal music (AM) – while lacking a tonal hierarchical structure, and while being highly dissonant and hard to predict – is nevertheless enjoyed by a group of avid listeners. We propose a research focus that investigates, in particular, the experience of AM as a novel and compelling way with which to enhance our understanding of both the aesthetic appreciation of music and the role of predictive models in the context of musical pleasure. We use music theoretical analysis and music information retrieval methods to demonstrate how AM presents the listener with a highly uncertain auditory environment. Specifically, an analysis of a corpus of 100 musical segments is used to illustrate how tonal classical music and AM differ quantitatively in terms of both key and pulse clarity values. We then examine person related, extrinsic and intrinsic factors, that point to potential mechanisms underlying the appreciation and pleasure derived from AM. We argue that personality traits like “openness to experience,” the framing of AM as art, and the mere exposure effect are key components of such mechanisms. We further argue that neural correlates of uncertainty estimation could represent a central mechanism for engaging with AM and that such contexts engender a comparatively weak predictive model in the listener. Finally we argue that in such uncertain contexts, correct predictions may be more subjectively rewarding than prediction errors since they signal to the individual that their predictive model is improving.

Humans automatically detect events that, in deviating from their expectations, may signal prediction failure and a need to reorient behaviour. The pupil dilation response (PDR) to violations has been associated with subcortical signals of arousal and prediction resetting. However, it is unclear how the context in which a deviant occurs affects the size of the PDR. Using ecological musical stimuli that we characterised using a computational model, we showed that the PDR to pitch deviants is sensitive to contextual uncertainty (quantified as entropy), whereby the PDR was greater in low than high entropy contexts. The PDR was also positively correlated with unexpectedness of notes. No effects of music expertise were found, suggesting a ceiling effect due to enculturation. These results show that the same sudden environmental change can lead to differing arousal levels depending on contextual factors, providing evidence for a sensitivity of the PDR to long-term context.

Our results show that destination memory in older adults is sensitive to familiarity of both destination and output information.

We compared destination memory to source memory in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), as the latter type of memory is believed to be severely deteriorated in AD. Control participants and AD patients were tested on two conditions, both of which had a study phase and a recognition phase. In the study phase of the first condition, participants had to tell a set of facts to the faces of a set of celebrities (destination memory). In the study phase of the second condition, they had to receive a different set of facts from a different set of celebrity faces (source memory). During the recognition phase, participants had to indicate, for destination memory, whether they had previously told a given fact to a given face (yes) or not (no) and, for source memory, whether they had previously received a given fact from a given face (yes) or not (no). In both conditions, they were asked to choose between "remember" or "know" options when answering "yes." AD patients showed reliable difficulties in destination recall, accompanied by a significant decrease in the number of "remember" responses they gave. AD-related destination memory decline may be attributed to the perturbation of episodic memory and its autonoetic reliving. The potential neural bases of this decline are discussed in terms of hippocampal failures.

The processing of valence is known to recruit the amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and relevant sensory areas. However, how these regions interact remains unclear. We recorded cortical electrical activity from 7 epileptic patients implanted with depth electrodes for presurgical evaluation while they listened to positively and negatively valenced musical chords. Time-frequency analysis suggested a specific role of the orbitofrontal cortex in the processing of positively valenced stimuli while, most importantly, Granger causality analysis revealed that the amygdala tends to drive both the orbitofrontal cortex and the auditory cortex in theta and alpha frequency bands, during the processing of valenced stimuli. Results from the current study show the amygdala to be a critical hub in the emotion processing network: specifically one that influences not only the higher order areas involved in the evaluation of a stimulus's emotional value but also the sensory cortical areas involved in the processing of its low-level acoustic features.