Dynamics of brain activity underlying working memory for music in a naturalistic condition

Abstract

Sivumäärä -Number of pages 70Tiivistelmä -Abstract Working memory (WM) is at the core of any cognitive function as it is necessary for the integration of information over time. Despite WM's critical role in high-level cognitive functions, its implementation in the neural tissue is poorly understood. Preliminary studies on auditory WM show differences between linguistic and musical memory, leading to the speculation of specific neural networks encoding memory for music. Moreover, in neuroscience WM has not been studied in naturalistic listening conditions but rather in artificial settings (e.g., n-back and Sternberg tasks). Western tonal music provides naturally occurring motivic repetition and variation, recognizable units serving as WM trigger, thus allowing us to study the phenomenon of motif-tracking in the context of real music. Adopting a modern tango as stimulus, behavioural methods were used to identify the stimulus motifs and build a time-course predictor of WM neural responses. This predictor was then correlated with the participants' functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signal obtained during a continuous listening condition. Neural correlates related to the sensory processing of a set of musical features were filtered out from the brain responses to music to aid in the exclusive recruitment of executive processes of music-related WM. Correlational analysis revealed a widely distributed network of cortical and subcortical areas, predominantly right-lateralized, responding to the WM condition, including ventral and dorsal areas in the prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, and limbic areas. Significant subcortical processing areas, active in response to the WM condition, were pruned with the removal of the acoustic content, suggesting these music-related perceptual processing areas might aid in the encoding and retrieval of WM. The pattern of dispersed neural activity indicates WM to emerge coherently from the integration of distributed neural activity spread out over different brain subsystems (motoric-, cognitive-and sensory-related areas of the brain).Asiasanat -Keywords working memory; cognitive neuroscience; music; musical motifs; functional magnetic resonance imaging ( Lashley was attempting to identify the locus of memory within the cortex, and, to do so, first trained rats to run mazes, and then removed various cortical regions. He allowed the animals to recover and tested the retention of the maze-running skills. To his surprise it was not possible to find a particular region corresponding to the ability to remember the way through a maze. Instead all the rats which had had cortex regions removed suffered some kind of impairment, and the extent of the impairment was roughly proportional to the amount of cortex taken off. Removing cortex damaged the motor and sensory capacities of the animals, and they would limp, hop, roll, or stagger, but somehow they always managed to traverse the maze. So far as memory 'as concerned, the cortex appeared to be equipotential, that is, with all regions of eq...

Music Perception in Dementia

“…An important theme emerging from this study is that auditory working memory deficits are likely to amplify any purely musical deficits (compare Figure 3 prior to adjustment for this factor and the unadjusted analysis summarised in Table S4 with the adjusted significance attributions in Table 2): patients presenting with impairments of music processing may be comparably impaired on processing of other extended auditory information streams. The extent to which musical deficits reflect music-specific processes might then depend on the nature of the interaction between auditory working memory and the relevant musical characteristic, as suggested by previous work [48][49][50]. This factor may partly explain the lack of evidence here for specific deficits of temporal pattern processing from music, which we anticipated particularly in the PNFA group [64].…”

“…Such comparisons are vulnerable to concurrent auditory working memory deficits that accompany AD and the progressive aphasias [17,18,[45][46][47]; moreover, the explicit serial comparison of sequential melodies is seldom required in everyday music listening. Whereas specific musical working memory systems are likely to be integrally linked to the perception of pitch and temporal patterns in music, these are separable from verbal and other working memory systems that might be generically involved in any auditory task [48][49][50].…”

Music and Brain Plasticity: How Sounds Trigger Neurogenerative Adaptations

“…It has been shown that some short-term plastic changes can even occur in the case of merely listening to music-without actually performing-(e.g., [95]) and in the short-time perspective of both listening and performing (e.g., [96]). Attentive listening to music in a real-time situation, in fact, is very demanding: it recruits multiple forms of memory, attention, semantic processing, target detection and motor function [18,97]. As such, we propose here that music represents a sort of enriched environment that invites the brain to raise its general level of conscious functioning.…”

Commentary on "Aesthetic Experience Explained by the Affect-Space Framework" by E. Schubert, A. C. North, & D. J. Hargreaves

“…In this field individuals' aesthetic responses to varying stimulus material (typically visual art) have been quantified in terms of preference, liking, and interest by means of subjective ratings. Similarly, I find that the authors put no emphasis on the dynamics (temporality) of aesthetic experiences, a matter that I find to be crucial in my own work (Alluri et al, 2015;Alluri et al, 2012;Brattico et al, 2016;Brattico, Bogert, et al, 2013;Brattico, Tupala, Glerean, & Tervaniemi, 2013;Burunat, Alluri, Toiviainen, Numminen, & Brattico, 2014;Nieminen, Istok, Brattico, Tervaniemi, & Huotilainen, 2011;Reybrouck & Brattico, 2015). In my view, the authors of the current proposal only partly recognize the large similarities with the concepts that were already present in the chronometric framework of an aesthetic experience of music (Brattico, Bogert, et al, 2013), in which discrete emotions were considered transient and only passages towards the true aesthetic responses, which included (felt) aesthetic emotions, such as enjoyment, liking and aesthetic judgments.…”