Abstract
Human listeners exhibit marked sensitivity to familiar music, perhaps most readily revealed by popular “name that tune” games, in which listeners often succeed in recognizing a familiar song based on extremely brief presentation. In this work, we used electroencephalography (EEG) and pupillometry to reveal the temporal signatures of the brain processes that allow differentiation between a familiar, well liked, and unfamiliar piece of music. In contrast to previous work, which has quantified gradual changes in pupil diameter (the so-called “pupil dilation response”), here we focus on the occurrence of pupil dilation events. This approach is substantially more sensitive in the temporal domain and allowed us to tap early activity with the putative salience network. Participants (N = 10) passively listened to snippets (750 ms) of a familiar, personally relevant and, an acoustically matched, unfamiliar song, presented in random order. A group of control participants (N = 12), who were unfamiliar with all of the songs, was also tested. We reveal a rapid differentiation between snippets from familiar and unfamiliar songs: Pupil responses showed greater dilation rate to familiar music from 100–300 ms post-stimulus-onset, consistent with a faster activation of the autonomic salience network. Brain responses measured with EEG showed a later differentiation between familiar and unfamiliar music from 350 ms post onset. Remarkably, the cluster pattern identified in the EEG response is very similar to that commonly found in the classic old/new memory retrieval paradigms, suggesting that the recognition of brief, randomly presented, music snippets, draws on similar processes.
Highlights
The human auditory system exhibits a marked sensitivity to familiar music[1,2,3,4,5,6]
Www.nature.com/scientificreports in the EEG literature that is tied to such recognition processes is the late positive potential (LPP)[22,23,24]: The correct identification of a familiar stimulus typically results in a sustained positivity ranging from 500 to 800 ms post-stimulation in left central-parietal regions, which is absent for unfamiliar stimuli[25]
In contrast to previous work, which has quantified changes in pupil diameter, we focus on pupil dilation events
Summary
The human auditory system exhibits a marked sensitivity to familiar music[1,2,3,4,5,6]. A particular marker www.nature.com/scientificreports in the EEG literature that is tied to such recognition processes is the late positive potential (LPP)[22,23,24]: The correct identification of a familiar stimulus typically results in a sustained positivity ranging from 500 to 800 ms post-stimulation in left central-parietal regions, which is absent for unfamiliar stimuli[25]. Pupil dilation reliably co-occurs with musical chills39–a physiological phenomenon evoked by exposure to emotionally relevant and familiar pieces of music[40] and hypothesized to reflect autonomic arousal Underlying these effects is the increasingly well understood link between non-luminance-mediated change in pupil size and the brain’s neuro-transmitter mediated salience and arousal network ( Acetylcholine and Norepinephrine)[41,42,43,44,45,46]
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