Capturing rhythm categorisation in the human brain across cortical and subcortical auditory signals
(2024) Neurosciences and Music - wiring, re-wiring, and well-being — Location: Helsinki, Finland (13.June.2024)
Files
No attached file found for this publication.
Details
- Authors
- Abstract
- Humans across cultures show an outstanding capacity to perceive, learn, and synchronise with musical rhythms. These skills rely on mapping the sheer diversity of external rhythms onto sets of internal rhythmic categories. Yet, the nature and neural basis of rhythm categorisation remain largely unknown. On the one hand, rhythmic categories may emerge from fundamental low-level physiology of neural assemblies already in subcortical auditory nuclei. Alternatively, or in addition, rhythm categorisation may rely on evolutionarily newer plastic cortical networks. Here, we investigate these questions using a novel approach that allows capturing categorical representations of rhythms from neural responses based on a combination of (i) electroencephalography (EEG), (ii) frequency-tagging, and (iii) representational similarity analysis (RSA). In a first experiment, the EEG was recorded while participants were listening to a number (N=13) of distinct two-interval rhythmic patterns whose interval ratio was evenly spaced between 1:1 and 2:1. A behavioural index of the perceptual categories was obtained by asking participants to synchronise finger tapping with the same stimuli in separate trials. Results indicate that the tapping and neural responses showed a consistent categorical structure, corroborating and extending previous behavioural findings. Importantly, these categorical representations cannot be simply explained by physical properties of the stimuli. In a second experiment, we coupled the novel approach with a functional localizer to simultaneously capture activity originating from higher-level cortical vs. subcortical sources, in the form of slow (< 20 Hz) and fast (> 150 Hz) EEG responses. Preliminary results show different representational structures in cortical compared to subcortical responses, suggesting that rhythm categorisation cannot be fully explained by subcortical auditory properties. Rather, our results seem to indicate that rhythm categorisation is further shaped at the cortical level, potentially through interactions within an extended network including motor and/or associative cortices.
- Affiliations
Citations
Barbero, F., Lenc, T., Jacoby, N., Polak, R., Varlet, M., & Nozaradan, S. (2024). Capturing rhythm categorisation in the human brain across cortical and subcortical auditory signals. Neurosciences and Music - wiring, re-wiring, and well-being, Helsinki, Finland. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/238412