Moving to Music: Effects of Heard and Imagined Musical Cues on Movement-Related Brain Activity

Abstract

Music is commonly used to facilitate or support movement, and increasingly used in movement rehabilitation. Additionally, there is some evidence to suggest that music imagery, which is reported to lead to brain signatures similar to music perception, may also assist movement. However, it is not yet known whether either imagined or musical cueing changes the way in which the motor system of the human brain is activated during simple movements. Here, functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to compare neural activity during wrist flexions performed to either heard or imagined music with self-pacing of the same movement without any cueing. Focusing specifically on the motor network of the brain, analyses were performed within a mask of BA4, BA6, the basal ganglia (putamen, caudate, and pallidum), the motor nuclei of the thalamus, and the whole cerebellum. Results revealed that moving to music compared with self-paced movement resulted in significantly increased activation in left cerebellum VI. Moving to imagined music led to significantly more activation in pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA) and right globus pallidus, relative to self-paced movement. When the music and imagery cueing conditions were contrasted directly, movements in the music condition showed significantly more activity in left hemisphere cerebellum VII and right hemisphere and vermis of cerebellum IX, while the imagery condition revealed more significant activity in pre-SMA. These results suggest that cueing movement with actual or imagined music impacts upon engagement of motor network regions during the movement, and suggest that heard and imagined cues can modulate movement in subtly different ways. These results may have implications for the applicability of auditory cueing in movement rehabilitation for different patient populations.

The feasibility of singing to improve gait in Parkinson disease

“…In the singing only condition, by contrast, no music was present so participants did not have to match their singing or footsteps to an external source. Higher variability in the musically-cued conditions may reflect the extra attentional resources required to synchronize even simple, automatic movements to sound [14]. Thus, participants may have had an easier time walking to the beat when they were able to generate the song themselves than when they had to synchronize to music.…”

“…Another possibility is that active music-making (such as singing) may confer greater motor benefits than passive music listening [30] by affecting movement “vigor” or eagerness to move. While synchronizing movement to music induces an arousal effect that makes movement faster, larger, and more vigorous [31] and can lead to greater motor network activation [14], synchronizing movement to one’s own voice may elicit an even stronger motor response, or at least a more precisely timed one.…”

Moving Stimuli Facilitate Synchronization But Not Temporal Perception

“…Synchronization with a beat has been increasingly used in the rehabilitation of Parkinson’s disease (Nombela et al, 2013; Repp and Su, 2013; Schaefer, 2014), and the potential of imagery-guided synchronization is gaining increased attention (Satoh and Kuzuhara, 2008; Schaefer et al, 2014) adding to ongoing questions on modality (Hove and Keller, 2015). Concerning the possibility of using imagery, our findings afford different predictions depending on whether we focus on phase-matching (variability in asynchronies) or period-matching (IRI variability).…”

Mental Representations in Musical Processing and their Role in Action-Perception Loops

“…Examples of cognition impacting movement are that mental imagery helps music performance and practice (Holmes, 2005;Parncutt, 2007), both auditory and movement imagination (or mental training) aid motor learning (Brown & Palmer, 2013), and that "cognitive" states can be translated into actions, such as emotional expression being recognizable in dance (Burger, Saarikallio, Luck, Thompson, & Toiviainen, 2013). The influence of cognition on action has also been demonstrated at the level of movement-related brain activations; moving to imagined music was found to lead to different activation patterns within the motor network of the brain than when identical movements were carried out without music imagery (Schaefer, Morcom, Roberts & Overy, 2014). Probably the least investigated effect direction is that of movement impacting cognition, but various findings have been reported, specifically in investigations addressing specific aspects of the theoretical framework of embodied cognition (for a description of different aspects, see Wilson, 2002).…”