The Effect of Conditional Probability of Chord Progression on Brain Response: An MEG Study

Abstract

BackgroundRecent electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies have explored how and where musical syntax in Western music is processed in the human brain. An inappropriate chord progression elicits an event-related potential (ERP) component called an early right anterior negativity (ERAN) or simply an early anterior negativity (EAN) in an early stage of processing the musical syntax. Though the possible underlying mechanism of the EAN is assumed to be probabilistic learning, the effect of the probability of chord progressions on the EAN response has not been previously explored explicitly.Methodology/Principal FindingsIn the present study, the empirical conditional probabilities in a Western music corpus were employed as an approximation of the frequencies in previous exposure of participants. Three types of chord progression were presented to musicians and non-musicians in order to examine the correlation between the probability of chord progression and the neuromagnetic response using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Chord progressions were found to elicit early responses in a negatively correlating fashion with the conditional probability. Observed EANm (as a magnetic counterpart of the EAN component) responses were consistent with the previously reported EAN responses in terms of latency and location. The effect of conditional probability interacted with the effect of musical training. In addition, the neural response also correlated with the behavioral measures in the non-musicians.Conclusions/SignificanceOur study is the first to reveal the correlation between the probability of chord progression and the corresponding neuromagnetic response. The current results suggest that the physiological response is a reflection of the probabilistic representations of the musical syntax. Moreover, the results indicate that the probabilistic representation is related to the musical training as well as the sensitivity of an individual.

Statistical Learning of Serial Visual Transitions by Neurons in Monkey Inferotemporal Cortex

“…The brain of an acculturated listener listening to a melody or a sentence is sensitive to how it will probably unfold. This is manifest in the fact that events violating reasonable expectation elicit strong neural responses (Dien et al, 2003;James et al, 2008;Vuust et al, 2009;Pearce et al, 2010;Kim et al, 2011). The ability of the brain to detect and respond to improbable events is thought to depend not only on mastery of complex rules that govern the event stream but also on the encoding of simple statistical relations (Aslin and Newport, 2012).…”

Pitch-class distribution modulates the statistical learning of atonal chord sequences

“…Repeated exposure to deviant chords in chord sequences did not influence the ERAN magnitude (Guo & Koelsch, 2015), suggesting that short-term experience could not modulate the early evoked responses such as the ERAN. A previous study demonstrated that conditional probabilities in Western music corpus were reflected in the ERAN even in nonmusicians, suggesting that the long-term musical knowledge is acquired by statistical learning (Kim et al, 2011).…”

“…The N400 could reflect transgressed endings of chord sequences in music (James, Cereghetti, Roullet, & Oechslin, 2015). The early right anterior negativity (ERAN), which was elicited by deviant chords embedded in chord progression in the same latency range of the ELAN, could reflect syntactic processes in music recognition (Kim, Kim, & Chung, 2011;Koelsch, Gunter, Friederici, & Schroger, 2000;Koelsch, 2009). Repeated exposure to deviant chords in chord sequences did not influence the ERAN magnitude (Guo & Koelsch, 2015), suggesting that short-term experience could not modulate the early evoked responses such as the ERAN.…”

The effects of supervised learning on event-related potential correlates of music-syntactic processing

“…With regard to violations of expectancies established on the basis of implicit knowledge, numerous neurophysiological studies have indicated that processing of music-syntactic expectancy violations is reflected electrically in an early anterior negativity that often has right-hemispheric weighting (the early right-anterior negativity, or ERAN; Koelsch et al, 2000;Leino et al, 2007;Carrión and Bly, 2008;Miranda and Ullman, 2007;Müller et al, 2010;Garza Villarreal et al, 2011;Kim et al, 2011;Kalda and Minati, 2012;Brattico et al, 2013;Koelsch et al, 2013;Sammler et al, 2013; for a review see Koelsch, 2012). ERAN effects have been shown in non-musicians, that is, in individuals who have implicit knowledge of music-syntactic regularities (although the ERAN has slightly larger amplitude in musicians than in non-musicians, e.g.…”