DYNAMICS OF BRAIN ACTIVITY UNDERLYING WORKING MEMORY FOR MUSIC IN A NATURALISTIC CONDITION

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event DYNAMICS OF BRAIN ACTIVITY UNDERLYING WORKING MEMORY FOR MUSIC IN A NATURALISTIC CONDITION Iballa Burunat1, 2*, Vinoo Alluri1, 2, Petri Toiviainen1 and Elvira Brattico1, 3, 4 1 University of Jyväskylä, Finnish Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research, Department of Music, Finland 2 University of Jyväskylä, Department of Mathematical Information Technology, Finland 3 University of Helsinki, Cognitive Brain Research Unit, Institute of Behavioural Sciences, Finland 4 Aalto University School of Science, Brain & Mind Lab, Department of Biomedical Engineering and Computational Science, Finland Despite working memory's (WM) critical role in high-level cognitive functions in the integration of information over time, its implementation in the neural tissue is poorly understood. Auditory WM has been mainly studied using vocal stimuli and only recently a few studies have started investigating the neural networks engaged in auditory WM for music. Moreover, in neuroscience WM has not been studied in naturalistic conditions but rather using artificial target detection tasks (e.g., n-back and Sternberg) and simpler, manipulated materials, all of which might create mental states not characteristic of brain’s behaviour in more natural, attentive situations. In music, WM allows us to form a coherent representation of the otherwise undifferentiated musical stream, and to emotionally respond to it, i.e., by tracking tonal, rhythmic and timbral dynamics. Our goal was to study the functional neuroanatomy of WM memory for musical motifs as it emerges in the brain while listening to music. We followed a naturalistic, non-standard procedure: a) participants’ (musicians) brain responses were recorded while attentively listening to a piece of music, instead of performing auditory cued tasks; b) we adopted a modern tango as stimulus, containing shifts in tempo, timbre, dynamics, tonality and rhythm, a complex stimulus more representative of the complex auditory scene environment our brains have evolved to respond to; c) we used a behavioural test to identify the stimulus motifs and build a time-course predictor of WM neural responses; d) activation of WM-related neural networks was studied by tracking in the neurovascular responses the temporal evolution of motivic repetition that naturally occurs in Western tonal music, assumed to trigger WM; and e) in order to fine-tune the identification of WM function in the brain, the variance accounted by a set of the stimulus’ acoustic features was pruned from participants’ brain responses. Correlational analysis revealed a distributed network of cortical and subcortical areas responding to motif repetitions, including a right lateralized dorsal area in the prefrontal cortex, bilateral basal ganglia, and left hippocampus. The findings suggest that WM encoding of motifs while listening to music emerges from the integration of neural activity spread out over cognitive, motor and limbic subsystems. The recruitment of the hippocampus stands as a novel finding in auditory WM. We hypothesize this activation to be enabled by the use of a realistic listening condition, which might evidence the formation of long-term memories for the music. Keywords: working memory, Music, naturalistic, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, Hippocampus, segmentation, neuroinformatics Conference: Neuroinformatics 2013, Stockholm, Sweden, 27 Aug - 29 Aug, 2013. Presentation Type: Poster Topic: General neuroinformatics Citation: Burunat I, Alluri V, Toiviainen P and Brattico E (2013). DYNAMICS OF BRAIN ACTIVITY UNDERLYING WORKING MEMORY FOR MUSIC IN A NATURALISTIC CONDITION. Front. Neuroinform. Conference Abstract: Neuroinformatics 2013. doi: 10.3389/conf.fninf.2013.09.00005 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 20 May 2013; Published Online: 11 Jul 2013. * Correspondence: Ms. Iballa Burunat, University of Jyväskylä, Finnish Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research, Department of Music, Jyväskylän yliopisto, Finland, iballa.burunat@jyu.fi Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Iballa Burunat Vinoo Alluri Petri Toiviainen Elvira Brattico Google Iballa Burunat Vinoo Alluri Petri Toiviainen Elvira Brattico Google Scholar Iballa Burunat Vinoo Alluri Petri Toiviainen Elvira Brattico PubMed Iballa Burunat Vinoo Alluri Petri Toiviainen Elvira Brattico Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.