Effect of Explicit Evaluation on Neural Connectivity Related to Listening to Unfamiliar Music

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

Elvira Brattico¹  Thomas Jacobsen²  Basel Abu-jamous²  Asoke K. Nandi⁴  Chao Liu⁴  Carlos S. Pereira⁴ 

[1] Royal Academy of Music Aarhus/Aalborg, Aarhus, Denmark;AMI Centre, School of Science, Aalto University, Espoo, Finland;;Department of Clinical Medicine, Center for Music in the Brain, Aarhus University &Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, United Kingdom;Experimental Psychology Unit, Helmut Schmidt University, University of Federal Armed Forces, Hamburg, Germany;

关键词: consensus clustering;    fMRI;    functional connectivity;    intentionality;    music emotions;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fnhum.2017.00611

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

People can experience different emotions when listening to music. A growing number of studies have investigated the brain structures and neural connectivities associated with perceived emotions. However, very little is known about the effect of an explicit act of judgment on the neural processing of emotionally-valenced music. In this study, we adopted the novel consensus clustering paradigm, called binarisation of consensus partition matrices (Bi-CoPaM), to study whether and how the conscious aesthetic evaluation of the music would modulate brain connectivity networks related to emotion and reward processing. Participants listened to music under three conditions – one involving a non-evaluative judgment, one involving an explicit evaluative aesthetic judgment, and one involving no judgment at all (passive listening only). During non-evaluative attentive listening we obtained auditory-limbic connectivity whereas when participants were asked to decide explicitly whether they liked or disliked the music excerpt, only two clusters of intercommunicating brain regions were found: one including areas related to auditory processing and action observation, and the other comprising higher-order structures involved with visual processing. Results indicate that explicit evaluative judgment has an impact on the neural auditory-limbic connectivity during affective processing of music.

【 授权许可】

Unknown