Search results for "Auditory Perception"
showing 10 items of 206 documents
The emergence of a shared action ontology: building blocks for a theory.
2003
To have an ontology is to interpret a world. In this paper we argue that the brain, viewed as a representational system aimed at interpreting our world, possesses an ontology too. It creates primitives and makes existence assumptions. It decomposes target space in a way that exhibits a certain invariance, which in turn is functionally significant. We will investigate which are the functional regularities guiding this decomposition process, by answering to the following questions: What are the explicit and implicit assumptions about the structure of reality, which at the same time shape the causal profile of the brain's motor output and its representational deep structure, in particular of t…
Different Brain Mechanisms Mediate Sensitivity to Sensory Consonance and Harmonic Context: Evidence from Auditory Event-Related Brain Potentials
2001
Abstract The goal of this study was to analyze the time-course of sensory (bottom-up) and cognitive (top-down) processes that govern musical harmonic expectancy. Eight-chord sequences were presented to 12 musicians and 12 nonmusicians. Expectations for the last chord were manipulated both at the sensory level (i.e., the last chord was sensory consonant or dissonant) and at the cognitive level (the harmonic function of the target was varied by manipulating the harmonic context built up by the first six chords of the sequence). Changes in the harmonic function of the target chord mainly modulate the amplitude of a positive component peaking around 300 msec (P3) after target onset, reflecting …
The neural basis of sublexical speech and corresponding nonspeech processing: a combined EEG-MEG study.
2014
Abstract We addressed the neural organization of speech versus nonspeech sound processing by investigating preattentive cortical auditory processing of changes in five features of a consonant–vowel syllable (consonant, vowel, sound duration, frequency, and intensity) and their acoustically matched nonspeech counterparts in a simultaneous EEG–MEG recording of mismatch negativity (MMN/MMNm). Overall, speech–sound processing was enhanced compared to nonspeech sound processing. This effect was strongest for changes which affect word meaning (consonant, vowel, and vowel duration) in the left and for the vowel identity change in the right hemisphere also. Furthermore, in the right hemisphere, spe…
Global context effects on musical expectancy.
1997
The effects of global harmonic contexts on expectancy formation were studied in a set of three experiments. Eight-chord sequences were presented to subjects. Expectations for the last chord were varied by manipulating the harmonic context created by the first six: in one context, the last chord was part of an authentic cadence (V–I), whereas in the other, it was a fourth harmonic degree following a full cadence (I–IV). Given this change in harmonic function, the last chord was assumed to be more expected in the former context, all the other local parameters being held constant. The effect of global context on expectancy formation was supported by the fact that subjects reported a lower degr…
Children's implicit knowledge of harmony in Western music.
2005
Three experiments examined children's knowledge of harmony in Western music. The children heard a series of chords followed by a final, target chord. In Experiment 1, French 6- and 11-year-olds judged whether the target was sung with the vowel /i/ or /u/. In Experiment 2, Australian 8- and 11-year-olds judged whether the target was played on a piano or a trumpet. In Experiment 3, Canadian 8- and 11-year-olds judged whether the target sounded good (i.e. consonant) or bad (dissonant). The target was either the most stable chord in the established musical key (i.e. the tonic, based on do, the first note of the scale) or a less stable chord. Performance was faster (Experiments 1, 2 and 3) and m…
Spike train statistics for consonant and dissonant musical accords in a simple auditory sensory model
2010
The phenomena of dissonance and consonance in a simple auditory sensory model composed of three neurons are considered. Two of them, here so-called sensory neurons, are driven by noise and subthreshold periodic signals with different ratio of frequencies, and its outputs plus noise are applied synaptically to a third neuron, so-called interneuron. We present a theoretical analysis with a probabilistic approach to investigate the interspike intervals statistics of the spike train generated by the interneuron. We find that tones with frequency ratios that are considered consonant by musicians produce at the third neuron inter-firing intervals statistics densities that are very distinctive fro…
Exploring Frequency-Dependent Brain Networks from Ongoing EEG Using Spatial ICA During Music Listening
2020
Recently, exploring brain activity based on functional networks during naturalistic stimuli especially music and video represents an attractive challenge because of the low signal-to-noise ratio in collected brain data. Although most efforts focusing on exploring the listening brain have been made through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), sensor-level electro- or magnetoencephalography (EEG/MEG) technique, little is known about how neural rhythms are involved in the brain network activity under naturalistic stimuli. This study exploited cortical oscillations through analysis of ongoing EEG and musical feature during freely listening to music. We used a data-driven method that co…
Neurobiological roots of language in primate audition : common computational properties
2015
Here, we present a new perspective on an old question: how does the neurobiology of human language relate to brain systems in nonhuman primates? We argue that higher-order language combinatorics, including sentence and discourse processing, can be situated in a unified, cross-species dorsal-ventral streams architecture for higher auditory processing, and that the functions of the dorsal and ventral streams in higher-order language processing can be grounded in their respective computational properties in primate audition. This view challenges an assumption, common in the cognitive sciences, that a nonhuman primate model forms an inherently inadequate basis for modeling higher-level language…
Atypical perceptual narrowing in prematurely born infants is associated with compromised language acquisition at 2 years of age
2010
Abstract Background Early auditory experiences are a prerequisite for speech and language acquisition. In healthy children, phoneme discrimination abilities improve for native and degrade for unfamiliar, socially irrelevant phoneme contrasts between 6 and 12 months of age as the brain tunes itself to, and specializes in the native spoken language. This process is known as perceptual narrowing, and has been found to predict normal native language acquisition. Prematurely born infants are known to be at an elevated risk for later language problems, but it remains unclear whether these problems relate to early perceptual narrowing. To address this question, we investigated early neurophysiolog…
Multi-subject fMRI analysis via combined independent component analysis and shift-invariant canonical polyadic decomposition
2014
Canonical polyadic decomposition (CPD) may face a local optimal problem when analyzing multi-subject fMRI data with inter-subject variability. Beckmann and Smith proposed a tensor PICA approach that incorporated an independence constraint to the spatial modality by combining CPD with ICA, and alleviated the problem of inter-subject spatial map (SM) variability.This study extends tensor PICA to incorporate additional inter-subject time course (TC) variability and to connect CPD and ICA in a new way. Assuming multiple subjects share common TCs but with different time delays, we accommodate subject-dependent TC delays into the CP model based on the idea of shift-invariant CP (SCP). We use ICA …