The aim of this study was to investigate how background auditory processing can affect other perceptual and cognitive processes as a function of stimulus content, style and emotional nature. Previous studies have offered contrasting evidence, and it has been recently shown that listening to music negatively affected concurrent mental processing in the elderly but not in young adults. To further investigate this matter, the effect of listening to music vs. listening to the sound of rain or silence was examined by administering an old/new face memory task (involving 448 unknown faces) to a group of 54 non-musician university students. Heart rate and diastolic and systolic blood pressure were measured during an explicit face study session that was followed by a memory test. The results indicated that more efficient and faster recall of faces occurred under conditions of silence or when participants were listening to emotionally touching music. Whereas auditory background (e.g., rain or joyful music) interfered with memory encoding, listening to emotionally touching music improved memory and significantly increased heart rate. It is hypothesized that touching music is able to modify the visual perception of faces by binding facial properties with auditory and emotionally charged information (music), which may therefore result in deeper memory encoding.

Previous studies suggested that listening to different types of music may modulate differently psychological mood and physiological responses associated with the induced emotions. In this study the effect of listening to instrumental classical vs. atonal contemporary music was examined in a group of 50 non-expert listeners. The subjects’ heart rate and diastolic and systolic blood pressure values were measured while they listened to music of different style and emotional typologies. Pieces were selected by asking a group of composers and conservatory professors to suggest a list of the most emotional music pieces (from Renaissance to present time). A total of 214 suggestions from 20 respondents were received. Then it was asked them to identify which pieces best induced in the listener feelings of agitation, joy or pathos and the number of suggested pieces per style was computed. Atonal pieces were more frequently indicated as agitating, and tonal pieces as joyful. The presence/absence of tonality in a musical piece did not affect the affective dimension of pathos (being touching). Among the most frequently cited six pieces were selected that were comparable for structure and style, to represent each emotion and style. They were equally evaluated as unfamiliar by an independent group of 10 students of the same cohort) and were then used as stimuli for the experimental session in which autonomic parameters were recorded. Overall, listening to atonal music (independent of the pieces’ emotional characteristics) was associated with a reduced heart rate (fear bradycardia) and increased blood pressure (both diastolic and systolic), possibly reflecting an increase in alertness and attention, psychological tension, and anxiety. This evidence fits with the results of the esthetical assessment showing how, overall, atonal music is perceived as more agitating and less joyful than tonal one.

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New information is rarely learned in isolation, instead most of what we experience can be incorporated into or uses previous knowledge networks in some form. However, most rodent laboratory tasks assume the animal to be naïve with no previous experience influencing the results. Previous knowledge in form of a schema can facilitate knowledge acquisition and accelerate systems consolidation: memories become more rapidly hippocampal independent and instead rely more on the prefrontal cortex. Here, we developed a new spatial navigation task where food locations are learned in a large, gangway maze -the HexMaze. Analysing performance across sessions as well as on specific trials, we can show simple memory effects as well as multiple effects of previous knowledge accelerating both online learning and performance increases over offline periods. Importantly, we are the first to show that schema build-up is dependent on how much time passes, not how often the animal is trained.

Objective. Understanding the function of brain cortices requires simultaneous investigation at multiple spatial and temporal scales and to link neural activity to an animal's behavior. A major challenge is to measure within- and across-layer information in actively behaving animals, in particular in mice that have become a major species in neuroscience due to an extensive genetic toolkit. Here we describe the Hybrid Drive, a new chronic implant for mice that combines tetrode arrays to record within-layer information with silicon probes to simultaneously measure across-layer information. Approach. The design of our device combines up to 14 tetrodes and 2 silicon probes, that can be arranged in custom arrays to generate unique areas-specific (and multi-area) layouts. Main Results. We show that large numbers of neurons and layer-resolved local field potentials can be recorded from the same brain region across weeks without loss in electrophysiological signal quality. The drive's lightweight structure (~3.5 g) leaves animal behavior largely unchanged, compared to other tetrode drives, during a variety of experimental paradigms. We demonstrate how the data collected with the Hybrid Drive allow state-of-the-art analysis in a series of experiments linking the spiking activity of CA1 pyramidal layer neurons to the oscillatory activity across hippocampal layers. Significance. Our new device fits a gap in the existing technology and increases the range and precision of questions that can be addressed about neural computations in freely behaving mice.