Abstract
Humans can anticipate music and derive pleasure from it. Expectations facilitate the learning of movements associated with anticipated events, and they are also linked with reward, which may further facilitate learning of the anticipated rewarding events. The present study investigates the synergistic effects of predictability and hedonic responses to music on arousal and motor-learning in a naïve population. Novel melodies were manipulated in their overall predictability (predictable/unpredictable) as objectively defined by a model of music expectation, and ranked as high/medium/low liked based on participants’ self-reports collected during an initial listening session. During this session, we also recorded ocular pupil size as an implicit measure of listeners’ arousal. During the following motor task, participants learned to play target notes of the melodies on a keyboard (notes were of similar motor and musical complexity across melodies). Pupil dilation was greater for liked melodies, particularly when predictable. Motor performance was facilitated in predictable rather than unpredictable melodies, but liked melodies were learned even in the unpredictable condition. Low-liked melodies also showed learning but mostly in participants with higher scores of task perceived competence. Taken together, these results highlight the effects of stimuli predictability on learning, which can be however overshadowed by the effects of stimulus liking or task-related intrinsic motivation.
Highlights
Humans can anticipate music and derive pleasure from it
Given the inherent link between predictability and pleasure in music, here we aim to assess their contributions to learning with the hypothesis that motor learning in naïve population may benefit from the implicit musical expectations and the hedonic responses derived from music
We further investigated the role of other factors than stimulus-induced affective responses in learning, as inter-individual differences associated with intrinsic motivation
Summary
Humans can anticipate music and derive pleasure from it. Expectations facilitate the learning of movements associated with anticipated events, and they are linked with reward, which may further facilitate learning of the anticipated rewarding events. Novel melodies were manipulated in their overall predictability (predictable/ unpredictable) as objectively defined by a model of music expectation, and ranked as high/medium/ low liked based on participants’ self-reports collected during an initial listening session. During this session, we recorded ocular pupil size as an implicit measure of listeners’ arousal. Through passive exposure to music, we implicitly develop models about its structure[1,2] These models allow both listeners to generate expectations about upcoming musical events[3,4,5], and trained musicians to better plan and learn musical actions[6,7,8,9]. Rarely used to measure response to long stimuli – such as a melody[58,59], pupil dilation may be powerful to continuously track hedonic responses to unfolding music[60]
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