Dance on cortex: enhanced theta synchrony in experts when watching a dance piece

Poikonen, Hanna; Toiviainen, Petri; Tervaniemi, Mari

doi:10.1111/ejn.13838

Cited by 24 publications

(29 citation statements)

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“…This effect may be attributed to plasticity changes occurring after intense body training (Giacosa et al, 2016;Hänggi et al, 2010), as in the case of increased grey matter (GM) volume found in the posterior hippocampal formation and in the lingual /fusiform gyri in dancers (Hüfner et al, 2011). These findings would strengthen the assumption of a more efficient visuomotor network in experts when compared with non-experts (Babiloni et al, 2010;Nakata et al, 2010;Pau et al, 2013;Poikonen et al, 2018).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Muscular effort coding in action representation in ballet dancers and controls: Electrophysiological evidence

2020

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Dancers and controls were shown technical ballet gestures during EEG recording.• Effortful and effortless movements were compared. • Effortful steps elicited a larger P300 and parietal LP (late positivity) in dancers.• Visuomotor regions were more active in dancers than controls in LP time window. • Expertise was required for an automatic and more refined coding of muscular effort. A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C TThe present electrophysiological (EEG) study investigated the neural correlates of perceiving effortful vs. effortless movements belonging to a specific repertoire (ballet). Previous evidence has shown an increased heart and respiratory rate during the observation and imagination of human actions that require a great muscular effort. In addition, TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation) and EEG studies have evidenced a greater musclespecific cortical excitability and an increase in late event-related potentials during the observation of effortful actions. In this investigation, fifteen professional female ballet dancers and 15 controls with no experience whatsoever with dance, gymnastics, or martial arts were recruited. They were shown 326 short videos displaying a male dancer performing standard ballet steps that could be either effortful or relatively effortless. Participants were instructed to observe each clip and imagine themselves physically executing the same movement. Importantly, they were blinded to the stimuli properties. The observation of effortful compared with effortless movements resulted in a larger P300 over frontal sites in dancers only, likely because of their visuomotor expertise with the specific steps. Moreover, an enhanced Late Positivity was identified over posterior sites in response to effortful stimuli in both groups, possibly reflecting the processing of larger quantities of visual kinematic information. The source reconstruction swLORETA performed on the Late Positivity component showed greater engagement of frontoparietal regions in dancers, while task-related frontal and occipitotemporal visual regions were more active in controls. It, therefore, appears that, in dancers, effort information was encoded in a more refined manner during action observation and in the absence of explicit instruction. Acquired motor knowledge seems to result in visuomotor resonance processes, which, in turn, underlies enhanced action representation of the observed movements.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Muscular effort coding in action representation in ballet dancers and controls: Electrophysiological evidence

2020

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“…For the participants who like dancing, music is comprehensive and collaborative. Music forms a setting in which dancers produce movements that are coherent with (or intentionally in contrast to) the prevailing sound in terms of rhythm, sentiment, and movement style (Poikonen et al 2018a). When freely listening, a participant might be more focused on the gist of the music than to the sequence of an individual instrument, melody contour, or rhythmic pattern.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring Frequency-Dependent Brain Networks from Ongoing EEG Using Spatial ICA During Music Listening

et al. 2020

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Recently, exploring brain activity based on functional networks during naturalistic stimuli especially music and video represents an attractive challenge because of the low signal-to-noise ratio in collected brain data. Although most efforts focusing on exploring the listening brain have been made through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), sensor-level electro-or magnetoencephalography (EEG/MEG) technique, little is known about how neural rhythms are involved in the brain network activity under naturalistic stimuli. This study exploited cortical oscillations through analysis of ongoing EEG and musical feature during freely listening to music. We used a data-driven method that combined music information retrieval with spatial Fourier Independent Components Analysis (spatial Fourier-ICA) to probe the interplay between the spatial profiles and the spectral patterns of the brain network emerging from music listening. Correlation analysis was performed between time courses of brain networks extracted from EEG data and musical feature time series extracted from music stimuli to derive the musical feature related oscillatory patterns in the listening brain. We found brain networks of musical feature processing were frequency-dependent. Musical feature time series, especially fluctuation centroid and key feature, were associated with an increased beta activation in the bilateral superior temporal gyrus. An increased alpha oscillation in the bilateral occipital cortex emerged during music listening, which was consistent with alpha functional suppression hypothesis in task-irrelevant regions. We also observed an increased delta-beta oscillatory activity in the prefrontal cortex associated with musical feature processing. In addition to these findings, the proposed method seems valuable for characterizing the large-scale frequency-dependent brain activity engaged in musical feature processing.

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“…At the beginning of the experiment, a 90-seconds resting EEG was collected with the participant’s eyes open and a 90-second resting EEG with eyes closed. The resting-state EEG was collected to compare resting EEG between the groups, reported in [ 15 ]. This is a crucial control condition if significant changes occur between groups during tasks.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While functional MRI (fMRI) studies highlight the importance of premotor areas in professional dancers when watching dance [ 8 ], musicians have refined function on regions related to memory and auditory-motor integration when listening to music [ 7 , 13 ]. In our two previous studies, we showed that dancers and musicians process fast changes in continuous music differently [ 14 ] and that the synchrony of activation is stronger in dancers than in musicians and laymen when watching an audiovisual dance piece [ 15 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Naturalistic music and dance: Cortical phase synchrony in musicians and dancers

2018

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Expertise in music has been investigated for decades and the results have been applied not only in composition, performance and music education, but also in understanding brain plasticity in a larger context. Several studies have revealed a strong connection between auditory and motor processes and listening to and performing music, and music imagination. Recently, as a logical next step in music and movement, the cognitive and affective neurosciences have been directed towards expertise in dance. To understand the versatile and overlapping processes during artistic stimuli, such as music and dance, it is necessary to study them with continuous naturalistic stimuli. Thus, we used long excerpts from the contemporary dance piece Carmen presented with and without music to professional dancers, musicians, and laymen in an EEG laboratory. We were interested in the cortical phase synchrony within each participant group over several frequency bands during uni- and multimodal processing. Dancers had strengthened theta and gamma synchrony during music relative to silence and silent dance, whereas the presence of music decreased systematically the alpha and beta synchrony in musicians. Laymen were the only group of participants with significant results related to dance. Future studies are required to understand whether these results are related to some other factor (such as familiarity to the stimuli), or if our results reveal a new point of view to dance observation and expertise.

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Dance on cortex: enhanced theta synchrony in experts when watching a dance piece

Cited by 24 publications

References 77 publications

Muscular effort coding in action representation in ballet dancers and controls: Electrophysiological evidence

Muscular effort coding in action representation in ballet dancers and controls: Electrophysiological evidence

Exploring Frequency-Dependent Brain Networks from Ongoing EEG Using Spatial ICA During Music Listening

Naturalistic music and dance: Cortical phase synchrony in musicians and dancers

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