scholarly journals Neural entrainment is strongest to the spectral flux of slow music and depends on familiarity and beat salience

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristin Weineck ◽  
Olivia Xin Wen ◽  
Molly J. Henry
Keyword(s):  
Neural Activity ◽  
Auditory Perception ◽  
Amplitude Envelope ◽  
Temporal Response ◽  
Musical Acoustics ◽  
Spectral Flux ◽  
Neural Entrainment ◽  
Components Analysis ◽  
Human Participants ◽  
Musical Tempo

Neural activity in the auditory system synchronizes to sound rhythms, and brain environment synchronization is thought to be fundamental to successful auditory perception. Sound rhythms are often operationalized in terms of the sound's amplitude envelope. We hypothesized that, especially for music, the envelope might not best capture the complex spectrotemporal fluctuations that give rise to beat perception and synchronize neural activity. This study investigated 1) neural entrainment to different musical features, 2) tempo dependence of neural entrainment, and 3) dependence of entrainment on familiarity, enjoyment, and ease of beat perception. In this electroencephalography study, 37 human participants listened to tempo modulated music (1 to 4 Hz). Independent of whether the analysis approach was based on temporal response functions (TRFs) or reliable components analysis (RCA), the spectral flux of music, as opposed to the amplitude envelope, evoked strongest neural entrainment. Moreover, music with slower beat rates, high familiarity, and easy to perceive beats elicited the strongest neural response. Based on the TRFs, we could decode music stimulation tempo, but also perceived beat rate, even when the two differed. Our results demonstrate the importance of accurately characterizing musical acoustics in the context of studying neural entrainment, and demonstrate the sensitivity of entrainment to musical tempo, familiarity, and beat salience.

scholarly journals Test-retest reliability of neural entrainment in the human auditory system

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuranny Cabral-Calderin ◽  
Molly J. Henry
Keyword(s):  
Auditory System ◽  
Neural Activity ◽  
Auditory Perception ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Alpha Phase ◽  
Gap Detection ◽  
Oscillatory Phase ◽  
Neural Entrainment ◽  
Test Retest Reliability ◽  
Over Time

AbstractAuditory stimuli are often rhythmic in nature. Brain activity synchronizes with auditory rhythms via neural entrainment, and entrainment seems to be beneficial for auditory perception. However, it is not clear to what extent neural entrainment in the auditory system is reliable over time – a necessary prerequisite for targeted intervention. The current study aimed to establish the reliability of neural entrainment over time and to predict individual differences in auditory perception from associated neural activity. Across two different sessions, human listeners detected silent gaps presented at different phase locations of a 2-Hz frequency modulated (FM) noise while EEG activity was recorded. As expected, neural activity was entrained by the 2-Hz FM noise. Moreover, gap detection was sinusoidally modulated by the phase of the 2-Hz FM into which the gap fell. Critically, both the strength of neural entrainment as well as the modulation of performance by the stimulus rhythm were highly reliable over sessions. Moreover, gap detection was predictable from pre-gap neural 2-Hz phase. Going beyond previous work, we found that stimulus-driven behavioral modulation was better predicted by the interaction between delta and alpha phase than by delta or alpha phase alone, both within and across sessions. Taken together, our results demonstrate that neural entrainment in the auditory system and the resulting behavioral modulation are reliable over time. In addition, both entrained delta and non-entrained alpha oscillatory phase contribute to near-threshold stimulus perception.

scholarly journals A neural representation of invisibility: when stimulus-specific neural activity negatively correlates with conscious experience

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew J Davidson ◽  
Will Mithen ◽  
Hinze Hogendoorn ◽  
Jeroen J.A. van Boxtel ◽  
Naotsugu Tsuchiya
Keyword(s):  
Neural Activity ◽  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Visual Awareness ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Focus Of Attention ◽  
Neural Representation ◽  
Visually Evoked Potentials ◽  
Neural Responses ◽  
Visual Objects ◽  
Human Participants

AbstractAlthough visual awareness of an object typically increases neural responses, we identify a neural response that increases prior to perceptual disappearances, and that scales with the amount of invisibility reported during perceptual filling-in. These findings challenge long-held assumptions regarding the neural correlates of consciousness and entrained visually evoked potentials, by showing that the strength of stimulus-specific neural activity can encode the conscious absence of a stimulus.Significance StatementThe focus of attention and the contents of consciousness frequently overlap. Yet what happens if this common correlation is broken? To test this, we asked human participants to attend and report on the invisibility of four visual objects which seemed to disappear, yet actually remained on screen. We found that neural activity increased, rather than decreased, when targets became invisible. This coincided with measures of attention that also increased when stimuli disappeared. Together, our data support recent suggestions that attention and conscious perception are distinct and separable. In our experiment, neural measures more strongly follow attention.

scholarly journals High-level cognition during story listening is reflected in high-order dynamic correlations in neural activity patterns

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy L. W. Owen ◽  
Thomas H. Chang ◽  
Jeremy R. Manning
Keyword(s):  
Neural Activity ◽  
Brain Activity ◽  
Activity Patterns ◽  
Dynamic Network ◽  
Brain Structures ◽  
High Order ◽  
Dynamic Correlations ◽  
Neuroimaging Data ◽  
Human Participants ◽  
High Level

AbstractOur thoughts arise from coordinated patterns of interactions between brain structures that change with our ongoing experiences. High-order dynamic correlations in neural activity patterns reflect different subgraphs of the brain’s functional connectome that display homologous lower-level dynamic correlations. Here we test the hypothesis that high-level cognition is reflected in high-order dynamic correlations in brain activity patterns. We develop an approach to estimating high-order dynamic correlations in timeseries data, and we apply the approach to neuroimaging data collected as human participants either listen to a ten-minute story or listen to a temporally scrambled version of the story. We train across-participant pattern classifiers to decode (in held-out data) when in the session each neural activity snapshot was collected. We find that classifiers trained to decode from high-order dynamic correlations yield the best performance on data collected as participants listened to the (unscrambled) story. By contrast, classifiers trained to decode data from scrambled versions of the story yielded the best performance when they were trained using first-order dynamic correlations or non-correlational activity patterns. We suggest that as our thoughts become more complex, they are reflected in higher-order patterns of dynamic network interactions throughout the brain.

Spontaneous Neural Fluctuations Predict Decisions to Attend

2014 ◽  
Vol 26 (11) ◽  
pp. 2578-2584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse J. Bengson ◽  
Todd A. Kelley ◽  
Xiaoke Zhang ◽  
Jane-Ling Wang ◽  
George R. Mangun
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Neural Activity ◽  
Intrinsic Property ◽  
Alternative View ◽  
Alpha Band ◽  
Band Power ◽  
Trial Basis ◽  
Human Participants ◽  
Neural Signaling ◽  
The Brain

Ongoing variability in neural signaling is an intrinsic property of the brain. Often this variability is considered to be noise and ignored. However, an alternative view is that this variability is fundamental to perception and cognition and may be particularly important in decision-making. Here, we show that a momentary measure of occipital alpha-band power (8–13 Hz) predicts choices about where human participants will focus spatial attention on a trial-by-trial basis. This finding provides evidence for a mechanistic account of decision-making by demonstrating that ongoing neural activity biases voluntary decisions about where to attend within a given moment.

scholarly journals Unexpected complexity of everyday manual behaviors

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuke Yan ◽  
James M. Goodman ◽  
Dalton D. Moore ◽  
Sara A. Solla ◽  
Sliman J. Bensmaia
Keyword(s):  
American Sign Language ◽  
Neural Control ◽  
Dimensional Space ◽  
Hand Movements ◽  
Higher Dimensional ◽  
Dimensionality Reduction Technique ◽  
Hand Control ◽  
Components Analysis ◽  
Human Participants ◽  
The Brain

AbstractHow does the brain control an effector as complex and versatile as the hand? One possibility is that the neural control of the hand is simplified by limiting the space of achievable hand postures. Indeed, hand kinematics can be largely accounted for within a small subspace of postures. This oft replicated finding has been interpreted as evidence that hand postures are confined to this subspace, and that leaving it volitionally is impossible. A prediction from this hypothesis is that measured hand movements that fall outside of this subspace reflect motor or measurement noise. To address this question, we track hand postures of human participants as they perform two distinct tasks – grasping and signing in American Sign Language. We then apply a standard dimensionality reduction technique – principal components analysis – and replicate the finding that hand movements can be largely described within a reduced subspace. However, we show that postural dimensions that fall outside of this subspace are highly structured and task dependent, suggesting that they too are under volitional control. We conclude that hand control occupies a higher dimensional space than previously considered, and propose that controlling the complexity of hand movements is well within the scope of the brain’s computational power.

scholarly journals Neural detection of changes in amplitude rise time in infancy.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Áine Ní Choisdealbha ◽  
Adam Attaheri ◽  
Sinead Rocha ◽  
Perrine Brusini ◽  
Sheila Flanagan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Speech Processing ◽  
Rise Time ◽  
Mismatch Negativity ◽  
Neural Processing ◽  
Amplitude Envelope ◽  
Acoustic Cues ◽  
Perceptual Sensitivity ◽  
Language Difficulties ◽  
Neural Entrainment ◽  
First Time

Amplitude rise times play a crucial role in the perception of rhythm in speech, and reduced perceptual sensitivity to differences in rise time is related to developmental language difficulties. Amplitude rise times also play a mechanistic role in neural entrainment to the speech amplitude envelope. Using an ERP paradigm, here we examined for the first time whether infants at the ages of seven and eleven months exhibit an auditory mismatch response to changes in the rise times of simple repeating auditory stimuli. We found that infants exhibited a mismatch response to the oddball rise time that was more positive at seven than eleven months of age. At eleven months, there was a left-lateralised shift to a mismatch negativity. Infants’ ability to detect changes in rise time was generally robust, with a range of oddball stimuli with different rise times each eliciting a mismatch response from 85% of infants. A lateralised effect indicated that the size of the mismatch response varied as the change in rise time became easier to detect. The mismatch response to the different rise time oddballs also stabilised as infants got older. The results indicate that neural processing of changes in rise time develops early in life, supporting the possibility that early speech processing is facilitated by neural sensitivity to these acoustic cues to rhythm.

scholarly journals Neural signatures of the processing of temporal patterns in sound

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Björn Herrmann ◽  
Ingrid S. Johnsrude
Keyword(s):  
Neural Activity ◽  
Auditory Task ◽  
Visual Object ◽  
Activity Levels ◽  
Tone Frequency ◽  
Neural Synchronization ◽  
Temporal Regularity ◽  
Sustained Activity ◽  
Human Participants ◽  
Neural Signatures

AbstractThe ability to detect regularities in sound (i.e., recurring structure) is critical for effective perception, enabling, for example, change detection and prediction. Two seemingly unconnected lines of research concern the neural operations involved in processing regularities: one investigates how neural activity synchronizes with temporal regularities (e.g., frequency modulation; FM) in sounds, whereas the other focuses on increases in sustained activity during stimulation with repeating tone-frequency patterns. In three electroencephalography studies with male and female human participants, we investigated whether neural synchronization and sustained neural activity are dissociable, or whether they are functionally interdependent. Experiment I demonstrated that neural activity synchronizes with temporal regularity (FM) in sounds, and that sustained activity increases concomitantly. In Experiment II, phase coherence of FM in sounds was parametrically varied. Although neural synchronization was more sensitive to changes in FM coherence, such changes led to a systematic modulation of both neural synchronization and sustained activity, with magnitude increasing as coherence increased. In Experiment III, participants either performed a duration categorization task on the sounds, or a visual object tracking task to distract attention. Neural synchronization was observed irrespective of task, whereas the sustained response was observed only when attention was on the auditory task, not under (visual) distraction. The results suggest that neural synchronization and sustained activity levels are functionally linked: both are sensitive to regularities in sounds. However, neural synchronization might reflect a more sensory-driven response to regularity, compared with sustained activity which may be influenced by attentional, contextual, or other experiential factors.Significance statementOptimal perception requires that the auditory system detects regularities in sounds. Synchronized neural activity and increases in sustained neural activity both appear to index the detection of a regularity, but the functional interrelation of these two neural signatures is unknown. In three electroencephalography experiments, we measured both signatures concomitantly while listeners were presented with sounds containing frequency modulations that differed in their regularity. We observed that both neural signatures are sensitive to temporal regularity in sounds, although they functionally decouple when a listener is distracted by a demanding visual task. Our data suggest that neural synchronization reflects a more automatic response to regularity, compared with sustained activity which may be influenced by attentional, contextual, or other experiential factors.

scholarly journals Linguistic processing of task-irrelevant speech at a Cocktail Party

eLife ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paz Har-shai Yahav ◽  
Elana Zion Golumbic
Keyword(s):  
Neural Activity ◽  
Irrelevant Speech ◽  
Cocktail Party ◽  
Noisy Environments ◽  
Linguistic Processing ◽  
Processing Resources ◽  
Posterior Parietal ◽  
Human Participants ◽  
Task Irrelevant ◽  
And Task

Paying attention to one speaker in noisy environments can be extremely difficult, because to-be-attended and task-irrelevant speech compete for processing resources. We tested whether this competition is restricted to acoustic-phonetic interference or if it extends to competition for linguistic processing as well. Neural activity was recorded using Magnetoencephalography as human participants were instructed to attended to natural speech presented to one ear, and task-irrelevant stimuli were presented to the other. Task-irrelevant stimuli consisted either of random sequences of syllables, or syllables structured to form coherent sentences, using hierarchical frequency-tagging. We find that the phrasal structure of structured task-irrelevant stimuli was represented in the neural response in left inferior frontal and posterior parietal regions, indicating that selective attention does not fully eliminate linguistic processing of task-irrelevant speech. Additionally, neural tracking of to-be-attended speech in left inferior frontal regions was enhanced when competing with structured task-irrelevant stimuli, suggesting inherent competition between them for linguistic processing.

scholarly journals Neural entrainment to music is sensitive to melodic spectral complexity

2020 ◽  
Vol 123 (3) ◽  
pp. 1063-1071
Author(s):  
Indiana Wollman ◽  
Pablo Arias ◽  
Jean-Julien Aucouturier ◽  
Benjamin Morillon
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Processing ◽  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Low Frequency ◽  
Neural Oscillations ◽  
Auditory Information ◽  
Coupling Mechanism ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Relative Contribution ◽  
Neural Entrainment ◽  
Human Participants

During auditory perception, neural oscillations are known to entrain to acoustic dynamics but their role in the processing of auditory information remains unclear. As a complex temporal structure that can be parameterized acoustically, music is particularly suited to address this issue. In a combined behavioral and EEG experiment in human participants, we investigated the relative contribution of temporal (acoustic dynamics) and nontemporal (melodic spectral complexity) dimensions of stimulation on neural entrainment, a stimulus-brain coupling phenomenon operationally defined here as the temporal coherence between acoustical and neural dynamics. We first highlight that low-frequency neural oscillations robustly entrain to complex acoustic temporal modulations, which underscores the fine-grained nature of this coupling mechanism. We also reveal that enhancing melodic spectral complexity, in terms of pitch, harmony, and pitch variation, increases neural entrainment. Importantly, this manipulation enhances activity in the theta (5 Hz) range, a frequency-selective effect independent of the note rate of the melodies, which may reflect internal temporal constraints of the neural processes involved. Moreover, while both emotional arousal ratings and neural entrainment were positively modulated by spectral complexity, no direct relationship between arousal and neural entrainment was observed. Overall, these results indicate that neural entrainment to music is sensitive to the spectral content of auditory information and indexes an auditory level of processing that should be distinguished from higher-order emotional processing stages. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Low-frequency (<10 Hz) cortical neural oscillations are known to entrain to acoustic dynamics, the so-called neural entrainment phenomenon, but their functional implication in the processing of auditory information remains unclear. In a behavioral and EEG experiment capitalizing on parameterized musical textures, we disentangle the contribution of stimulus dynamics, melodic spectral complexity, and emotional judgments on neural entrainment and highlight their respective spatial and spectral neural signature.

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