Towards a neural basis of music perception

Music perception involves complex brain functions underlying acoustic analysis, auditory memory, auditory scene analysis, and processing of musical syntax and semantics. Moreover, music perception potentially affects emotion, influences the autonomic nervous system, the hormonal and immune systems, and activates (pre)motor representations. During the past few years, research activities on different aspects of music processing and their neural correlates have rapidly progressed. This article provides an overview of recent developments and a framework for the perceptual side of music processing. This framework lays out a model of the cognitive modules involved in music perception, and incorporates information about the time course of activity of some of these modules, as well as research findings about where in the brain these modules might be located.     

Towards a neural basis of auditory sentence processing

Functional dissociations within the neural basis of auditory sentence processing are difficult to specify because phonological, syntactic and semantic information are all involved when sentences are perceived. In this review I argue that sentence processing is supported by a temporo-frontal network. Within this network, temporal regions subserve aspects of identification and frontal regions the building of syntactic and semantic relations. Temporal analyses of brain activation within this network support syntax-first models because they reveal that building of syntactic structure precedes semantic processes and that these interact only during a later stage.     

The sleeping brain and the neural basis of emotions

In addition to active wake, emotions are generated and experienced in a variety of functionally different states such as those of sleep, during which external stimulation and cognitive control are lacking. The neural basis of emotions can be specified by regarding the multitude of emotion-related brain states, as well as the distinct neuro- and psychodynamic stages (generation and regulation) of emotional experience.     

Characterisation of music-evoked autobiographical memories

Despite music's prominence in Western society and its importance to individuals in their daily lives, very little is known about the memories and emotions that are often evoked when hearing a piece of music from one's past. We examined the content of music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs) using a novel approach for selecting stimuli from a large corpus of popular music, in both laboratory and online settings. A set of questionnaires probed the cognitive and affective properties of the evoked memories. On average, 30% of the song presentations evoked autobiographical memories, and the majority of songs also evoked various emotions, primarily positive, that were often felt strongly. The third most common emotion was nostalgia. Analyses of written memory reports found both general and specific levels of autobiographical knowledge to be represented, and several social and situational contexts for memory formation were common across many memories. The findings indicate that excerpts of popular music serve as potent stimuli for studying the structure of autobiographical memories.     

Characterization of music-evoked autobiographical memories

Despite music's prominence in Western society and its importance to individuals in their daily lives, very little is known about the memories and emotions that are often evoked when hearing a piece of music from one's past. We examined the content of music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs) using a novel approach for selecting stimuli from a large corpus of popular music, in both laboratory and online settings. A set of questionnaires probed the cognitive and affective properties of the evoked memories. On average, 30% of the song presentations evoked autobiographical memories, and the majority of songs also evoked various emotions, primarily positive, that were felt strongly. The third most common emotion was nostalgia. Analyses of written memory reports found both general and specific levels of autobiographical knowledge to be represented, and several social and situational contexts for memory formation were common across many memories. The findings indicate that excerpts of popular music serve as potent stimuli for studying the structure of autobiographical memories.     

Dissociable neural systems for recognizing emotions

This study tested the hypothesis that the recognition of emotions would draw upon anatomically separable brain regions, depending on whether the stimuli were static or explicitly conveyed information regarding actions. We investigated the hypothesis in a rare subject with extensive bilateral brain lesions, patient B., by administering tasks that assessed recognition and naming of emotions from visual and verbal stimuli, some of which depicted actions and some of which did not. B. could not recognize any primary emotion other than happiness, when emotions were shown as static images or given as single verbal labels. By contrast, with the notable exception of disgust, he correctly recognized primary emotions from dynamic displays of facial expressions as well as from stories that described actions. Our findings are consistent with the idea that information about actions is processed in occipitoparietal and dorsal frontal cortices, all of which are intact in B.'s brain. Such information subsequently would be linked to knowledge about emotions that depends on structures mapping somatic states, many of which are also intact in B.'s brain. However, one of these somatosensory structures, the insula, is bilaterally damaged, perhaps accounting for B.'s uniformly impaired recognition of disgust (from both static and action stimuli). Other structures that are damaged in B.'s brain, including bilateral inferior and anterior temporal lobe and medial frontal cortices, appear to be critical for linking perception of static stimuli to recognition of emotions. Thus the retrieval of knowledge regarding emotions draws upon widely distributed and partly distinct sets of neural structures, depending on the attributes of the stimulus.     

Towards a true neural stance on consciousness

Consciousness is traditionally defined in mental or psychological terms. In trying to find its neural basis, introspective or behavioral observations are considered the gold standard, to which neural measures should be fitted. I argue that this poses serious problems for understanding the mind-brain relationship. To solve these problems, neural and behavioral measures should be put on an equal footing. I illustrate this by an example from visual neuroscience, in which both neural and behavioral arguments converge towards a coherent scientific definition of visual consciousness. However, to accept this definition, we need to let go of our intuitive or psychological notions of conscious experience and let the neuroscience arguments have their way. Only by moving our notion of mind towards that of brain can progress be made.     

Towards a functional neural systems model of developmental stuttering

This paper overviews recent developments in an ongoing program of brain imaging research on developmental stuttering that is being conducted at the University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio. This program has primarily used H₂¹⁵O PET imaging of different speaking tasks by right-handed adult male and female persistent stutterers, recovered stutterers and controls in order to isolate the neural regions that are functionally associated with stuttered speech. The principal findings have emerged from studies using condition contrasts and performance correlation techniques. The emerging findings from these studies are reviewed and referenced to a neural model of normal speech production recently proposed by Jürgens [Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 26 (2002) 235]. This paper will report (1) the reconfiguration of previous findings within the Jürgens Model; (2) preliminary findings of an investigation with late recovered stutterers; (3) an investigation of neural activations during a treatment procedure designed to produce a sustained improvement in fluency; and (4) an across-studies comparison that seeks to isolate neural regions within the Jürgens Model that are consistently associated with stuttering. Two regions appear to meet this criterion: right anterior insula (activated) and anterior middle and superior temporal gyri (deactivated) mainly in right hemisphere. The implications of these findings and the direction of future imaging investigations are discussed.

Educational objectives: The reader will learn about (1) recent uses of H₂¹⁵O PET imaging in stuttering research; (2) the use of a new neurological model of speech production in imaging research on stuttering; and (3) initial findings from PET imaging investigations of treated and recovered stutterers.     

The neural basis of cognitive development: a constructivist manifesto

How do minds emerge from developing brains? According to "neural constructivism," the representational features of cortex are built from the dynamic interaction between neural growth mechanisms and environmentally derived neural activity. Contrary to popular selectionist models that emphasize regressive mechanisms, the neurobiological evidence suggests that this growth is a progressive increase in the representational properties of cortex. The interaction between the environment and neural growth results in a flexible type of learning: "constructive learning" minimizes the need for prespecification in accordance with recent neurobiological evidence that the developing cerebral cortex is largely free of domain-specific structure. Instead, the representational properties of cortex are built by the nature of the problem domain confronting it. This uniquely powerful and general learning strategy undermines the central assumption of classical learnability theory, that the learning properties of a system can be deduced from a fixed computational architecture. Neural constructivism suggests that the evolutionary emergence of neocortex in mammals is a progression toward more flexible representational structures, in contrast to the popular view of cortical evolution as an increase in innate, specialized circuits. Human cortical postnatal development is also more extensive and protracted than generally supposed, suggesting that cortex has evolved so as to maximize the capacity of environmental structure to shape its structure and function through constructive learning.     

The neural basis of mirror symmetry detection: a review

The human visual system is extremely sensitive to the presence of bilateral (mirror) symmetry. In this review, I summarise the results of recent work investigating the neural basis of mirror symmetry detection, focusing in particular on brain stimulation evidence. Overall, available findings converge in pointing to the lateral occipital (LO) complex, especially in the right hemisphere, as a key region causally involved in symmetry detection. Interestingly, they also suggest that another region in the right extrastriate visual cortex, the occipital face area (OFA), is causally implied in symmetry detection, posing an interesting connection at the neural level between visual cortex responses to faces and to symmetry. Finally, this review also considers evidence on haptic symmetry detection in sighted and early blind individuals that points to LO as a multi-modal symmetry-sensitive region, and suggests that symmetry is a salient perceptual feature mediated by LO even when any visual experience is missing.     

The neural basis of event-time introspection

We explored the neural mechanisms allowing humans to report the subjective onset times of conscious events. Magnetoencephalographic recordings of neural oscillations were obtained while human subjects introspected the timing of sensory, intentional, and motor events during a forced choice task. Brain activity was reconstructed with high spatio-temporal resolution. Event-time introspection was associated with specific neural activity at the time of subjective event onset which was spatially distinct from activity induced by the event itself. Different brain regions were selectively recruited for introspection of different event types, e.g., the bilateral angular gyrus for introspection of intention. Our results suggest that event-time introspection engages specific neural networks to assess the contents of consciousness. Subjective event times should therefore be interpreted as the result of complex interactions between introspection and experience networks, rather than as direct reproduction of the individual’s conscious state or as a mere post hoc interpretation.     

Overlapping neural substrates between intentional and incidental down-regulation of negative emotions

Emotion regulation can be achieved in various ways, but few studies have evaluated the extent to which the neurocognitive substrates of these distinct operations overlap. In the study reported here, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure activity in the amygdala and prefrontal cortex of 10 participants who completed two independent tasks of emotion regulation-reappraisal, measuring intentional emotion regulation, and affect labeling, measuring incidental emotion regulation-with the objective of identifying potential overlap in the neural substrates underlying each task. Analyses focused on a priori regions of interest in the amygdala and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). For both tasks, fMRI showed decreased amygdala activation during emotion regulation compared with emotion conditions. During reappraisal, this decrease in amygdala activation was accompanied by a proportional decrease in emotional intensity ratings; during affect labeling, the decrease in amygdala activation correlated with self-reported aggression. Importantly, across participants, the magnitude of decrease in amygdala activation during reappraisal correlated with the magnitude of decrease during affect labeling, even though the tasks were administered on separate days, and values indexing amygdala activation during each task were extracted independently of one another. In addition, IFG-amygdala connectivity, assessed via psychophysiological interaction analysis, overlapped between tasks in two regions within the right IFG. The results suggest that the two tasks recruit overlapping regions of prefrontal cortex, resulting in similar reductions in amygdala activation, regardless of the strategy employed. Intentional and incidental forms of emotion regulation, despite their phenomenological differences, may therefore converge on a common neurocognitive pathway.     

The involuntary nature of music-evoked autobiographical memories in Alzheimer's disease

The main objective of this paper was to examine the involuntary nature of music-evoked autobiographical memories. For this purpose, young adults, older adults, and patients with a clinical diagnosis of probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) were asked to remember autobiographical events in two conditions: after being exposed to their own chosen music, and in silence. Compared to memories evoked in silence, memories evoked in the "Music" condition were found to be more specific, accompanied by more emotional content and impact on mood, and retrieved faster. In addition, these memories engaged less executive processes. Thus, with all these characteristics and the fact that they are activated by a perceptual cue (i.e., music), music-evoked autobiographic memories have all the features to be considered as involuntary memories. Our paper reveals several characteristics of music-evoked autobiographical memories in AD patients and offers a theoretical background for this phenomenon.     

The neural basis of primate social communication

A sophisticated ability both to generate displays of emotion and to respond to expressive behaviors of other individuals has emerged as a specialization in the course of primate evolution. Studies of the social behavior of nonhuman primates, especially those most related to ourselves, indicate that monkeys and apes are able to interpret social signals so as to assess the motivations of others. Studies of brain activity in monkeys looking at pictures of faces, facial expressions, and body movements, reveal regions of apparent specialized responsiveness to visual social stimuli. The existence of a discrete neural system in humans for cognition which generates a psychological model of others is suggested by patterns of deficit seen in certain neurologic syndromes. Empathy has several components and appears to lie on an evolutionary continuum.Based on a presentation given in New Orleans on February 17, 1990, at the AAAS symposium Empathy in Infancy and Later Development. Supported by the Department of Veterans Affairs.     

人们为什么会羞怯：认知机制及神经基础

羞怯指个体在社交情境下的抑制, 是个体参与社交的阻碍。近年来, 关于羞怯的认知神经科学研究增多, 学者基于元认知模型、社会适应模型、侧化脑-体情绪模型等理论, 探讨了大脑结构和功能以及几种与感知觉和注意相关的ERP成分与羞怯的关系。但当前关于羞怯认知神经科学的理论和实证研究尚处于起步阶段。基于上述提出羞怯的心理发展模型; 未来应从人格和情绪双角度研究羞怯, 并在开发研究范式的基础上, 加大羞怯认知神经机制的探讨。