Cognitive origins of musical communication

我的长期目标是了解音乐大脑为什么某些音乐序列比另一些更容易记忆，音乐是如何传达情感的，音乐是从哪里来的，以及大脑如何辅助音乐感知和认知。因为音乐已经伴随我们人类很长时间了，而且因为人们对它有如此强烈的情感反应，理解音乐可以作为认知神经科学中情感、记忆、知觉和更高层次认知的窗口。 我的短期目标是专注于与音高的感知、分类和记忆编码相关的问题。我希望专注于由以下问题驱动的行为实验：音高的心理表征的性质是什么？次要的问题包括音乐专业知识在塑造这些精神表征中的作用，以及它们的可塑性程度。为了研究这些问题，我计划从三个基本范式开始，看看它们会走向何方。我把这种现象称为“音乐交流的认知起源”，因为音高分类和记忆是认知的自上而下的过程，对于理解为什么音乐对我们人类具有智力和情感上的影响是基本的(以及对节奏、时间、幅度变化和音色的理解)。这是一个包罗万象的标题，反映了NSERC计划的“发现”性质，涵盖了这一应用程序。我认为下面列出的5个范例构成了一个5年研究计划。尽管很容易认为它们是每年一次，但更现实的是，我认为每一次都需要几年时间，但在某种程度上是并行进行的。这些简短的小插曲是为了给工作带来一种味道，并充分预期这里概述的骨架形式的研究将得到充实，并根据结果指示进行后续工作。引用的论文中包含了完整的方法。 范式1将音高和音阶结构的图式知识与音高的短期记忆进行对比，以评估长期记忆中的习得结构能够在多大程度上压倒这些音调结构的短期扭曲。这将解决记忆和听觉模式感知的基本问题。 范式2采用了音素知觉中使用的标准自由分类任务(Kuhl，1991；Studdert-Kennedy，Liberman，Harris&Cooper，1970)，用于更好地理解绝对音高和非绝对音高音乐家的分类功能和对音高的明确分类。 范式3将探索我们已经发现的一种很有前途的新听觉错觉，在这种错觉中，可以在没有明显音调的情况下识别旋律。 范式4将继续我们对音乐偏好心理结构的研究。 范式5将调查催产素在社会联系体验中的作用，许多人在从事音乐活动后报告说。

My long-term objective is to understand the musical brain why some musical sequences are better remembered than others, how music conveys emotion, where music came from, and how the brain subserves musical perception and cognition. Because music has been with our species for a long time, and because people have such strong emotional reactions to it, understanding music can serve as a window in the cognitive neuroscience of emotion, memory, perception, and higher-order cognition. My short-term goal is to focus on issues relating to perception, categorization, and memory encoding of musical pitch. I hope to concentrate on behavioural experiments driven by the following question: what is the nature of mental representations for pitch? Subsidiary concerns include the role of musical expertise in shaping those mental representations, and the extent to which they are malleable. To investigate these questions, I plan to begin with three basic paradigms and see where they lead. I've called this "cognitive origins of musical communication" because pitch categorization and memory are cognitive, top-down processes that are fundamental (along with an understanding of rhythm, timing, amplitude variation and timbre) to understanding why music has the intellectual and emotional impact that it does on we humans. It is an inclusive title reflecting the "discovery" nature of the NSERC program that covers this application. I believe the 5 paradigms listed below constitute a 5-year research plan. Although it is tempting to think of them as one per year, more realistically I think they will each take a couple of years but will be done to some extent in parallel. These brief vignettes are presented to give a flavor of the work, with full anticipation that the studies outlined here in skeleton form will be both fleshed out and followed up on as results dictate. Full methods are contained in the papers cited. Paradigm 1 will pit schematic knowledge of pitch and scale structures against short term memory for pitch, to assess the degree to which learned structures in long-term memory can overpower or be overpowered by short term distortions of those pitch structures. This will address foundational issues in memory and perception of auditory patterns. Paradigm 2 adapts a standard free-classification task used in the perception of phonemes (Kuhl, 1991; Studdert-Kennedy, Liberman, Harris & Cooper, 1970), for use with pitch to better understand classification functions and explicit categorization of pitch in both absolute pitch and non-absolute pitch musicians. Paradigm 3 will explore a promising new auditory illusion we have discovered in which melodies can be identified in the absence of overt pitch. Paradigm 4 will continue our work on the psychological structure of musical preferences. Paradigm 5 will investigate the role of oxytocin in the experience of social bonding many people report after engaging in musical activities.