0000000000222319
AUTHOR
Tommi Makkonen
Audiovisual attention boosts letter-speech sound integration
We studied attention effects on the integration of written and spoken syllables in fluent adult readers by using event-related brain potentials. Auditory consonant-vowel syllables, including consonant and frequency changes, were presented in synchrony with written syllables or their scrambled images. Participants responded to longer-duration auditory targets (auditory attention), longer-duration visual targets (visual attention), longer-duration auditory and visual targets (audiovisual attention), or counted backwards mentally. We found larger negative responses for spoken consonant changes when they were accompanied by written syllables than when they were accompanied by scrambled text. Th…
Music-induced positive mood broadens the scope of auditory attention
Previous studies indicate that positive mood broadens the scope of visual attention, which can manifest as heightened distractibility. We used event-related potentials (ERP) to investigate whether music-induced positive mood has comparable effects on selective attention in the auditory domain. Subjects listened to experimenter-selected happy, neutral or sad instrumental music and afterwards participated in a dichotic listening task. Distractor sounds in the unattended channel elicited responses related to early sound encoding (N1/MMN) and bottom-up attention capture (P3a) while target sounds in the attended channel elicited a response related to top-down-controlled processing of task-releva…
Cortical processing of musical sounds in children with Cochlear Implants
Abstract Objective We studied the neurocognitive mechanisms of musical instrument sound perception in children with Cochlear Implants (CIs) and in children with normal hearing (NH). Methods ERPs were recorded in a new multi-feature change-detection paradigm. Three magnitudes of change in fundamental frequency, musical instrument, duration, intensity increments and decrements, and presence of a temporal gap were presented amongst repeating 295 Hz piano tones. Independent Component Analysis was utilized to remove artifacts caused by the Cochlear Implants. Results The ERPs were similar in the two groups across all perceptual dimensions except for intensity increment deviants. CI children had s…
Processing of prosodic changes in natural speech stimuli in school-age children.
Speech prosody conveys information about important aspects of communication: the meaning of the sentence and the emotional state or intention of the speaker. The present study addressed processing of emotional prosodic changes in natural speech stimuli in school-age children (mean age 10 years) by recording the electroencephalogram, facial electromyography, and behavioral responses. The stimulus was a semantically neutral Finnish word uttered with four different emotional connotations: neutral, commanding, sad, and scornful. In the behavioral sound-discrimination task the reaction times were fastest for the commanding stimulus and longest for the scornful stimulus, and faster for the neutra…
Musical training facilitates the neural discrimination of major versus minor chords in 13-year-old children
Music practice since childhood affects the development of hearing skills. An important classification in Western music is the chords’ major-minor dichotomy. Its preattentive auditory discrimination was studied here using a mismatch negativity (MMN) paradigm in 13-year-olds with active hobbies, music-related (music group) or other (control group). In a context of root major chords, root minor chords and inverted major chords were presented infrequently. The interval structure of inverted majors differs more from root majors than the interval structure of root minors. However, the identity of the chords is the same in inverted and root majors (major), but different in root minors. The deviant…