Diana Omigie

• Paris Brain Institute, French National Centre for Scientific Research

Curiosity, a crucial trigger of exploration and learning, has been described as the antithesis of mind wandering, a state of non-engagement with the external environment or a given task. Findings have confirmed that music’s structure influences levels of curiosity in listeners as they listen and, as such, suggests that this context could be useful...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0293412.].

Using art and aesthetics as context, we explore the notion that curiosity and creativity emanate from a single novelty-seeking mechanism and outline support for the idea. However, we also highlight the importance of learning progress tracking in exploratory action and advocate for a nuanced understanding that aligns novelty-seeking with learnabilit...

The present study proposes a new approach to musical referentiality and its alleged tendency to relate to bodily experience and movement. To address this, we collected a corpus of 38,587 words (2,265 verbal descriptions of ‘associations’ or ‘imagery’ sparked by short musical excerpts by 554 participants from 32 countries). We tested the hypotheses...

Visual imagery has been proposed to be one of eight mechanisms by which music induces emotion in listeners. Initial research into aphantasia, a condition referring to individuals who do not (or only minimally) form visual imagery in their mind's eye, suggests that aphantasics may experience reduced emotional experiences in response to imagined stim...

The current paper offers a model of time-varying music engagement, defined as changes in curiosity, attention and positive valence, as music unfolds over time. First, we present research (including new data) showing that listeners tend to allocate attention to music in a manner that is guided by both features of the music and listeners' individual...

It is thought that the presence of music influences episodic memory encoding. However, no studies have isolated the influence of music liking – the hedonic value listeners attribute to a musical stimulus – from that of the core affect induced by the presence of that music. In an online survey, participants rated musical excerpts in terms of how muc...

Recent evidence suggests that the presence of music experienced as pleasant positively influences episodic memory (EM) encoding. However, it is unclear whether this impact of pleasant music holds regardless of how arousing the music is, and what influence, if any, music-induced aesthetic emotions have. Furthermore, most music EM studies have used v...

Musical ensemble performances provide an ideal environment to gain knowledge about complex human interactions. Network structures of synchronization can reflect specific roles of individual performers on the one hand and a higher level of organization of all performers as a superordinate system on the other. This study builds on research on joint s...

Atonal music is often characterized by low predictability stemming from the absence of tonal or metrical hierarchies. In contrast, Western tonal music exhibits intrinsic predictability due to its hierarchical structure and therefore, offers a directly accessible predictive model to the listener. In consequence, a specific challenge of atonal music...

Involuntary musical imagery repetition (IMIR), colloquially known as “earworms,” is a form of musical imagery that arises involuntarily and repeatedly in the mind. A growing number of studies, based on retrospective reports, suggest that IMIR experiences are associated with certain musical features, such as fast tempo and the presence of lyrics, an...

Predictive models in the brain rely on the continuous extraction of regularities from the environment. These models are thought to be updated by novel information, as reflected in prediction error responses such as the mismatch negativity (MMN). However, although in real life individuals often face situations in which uncertainty prevails, it remai...

Predictive models in the brain rely on the continuous extraction of regularities from the environment. These models are thought to be updated by novel information, as reflected in prediction error responses such as the mismatch negativity (MMN). However, although in real life individuals often face situations in which uncertainty prevails, it remai...

It is now widely accepted that the perception of emotional expression in music can be vastly different from the feelings evoked by it. However, less understood is how the locus of emotion affects the experience of music, that is how the act of perceiving the emotion in music compares with the act of assessing the emotion induced in the listener by...

It is now widely accepted that the perception of emotional expression in music can be vastly different from the feelings evoked by it. However, less understood is how the locus of emotion affects the experience of music, that is how the act of perceiving the emotion in music compares with the act of assessing the emotion induced in the listener by...

Studies investigating the neural processing of musico-acoustic features have tended to do so using highly controlled musical stimuli. However, it is increasingly argued that failing to use naturalistic stimuli limits the extent to which findings from lab studies can be extrapolated to rich and varied real-world experiences. Here, we recorded brain...

A listener's aesthetic engagement with a musical piece often reaches peaks in response to passages experienced as especially beautiful. The present study examined the extent to which responses to such self-identified beautiful passages (BPs), in self-selected music, may be distinguishable in terms of their affective qualities. In an online survey,...

Humans automatically detect events that, in deviating from their expectations, may signal prediction failure and a need to reorient behaviour. The pupil dilation response (PDR) to violations has been associated with subcortical signals of arousal and prediction resetting. However, whether and how PDR to a deviant is modulated by the structure of th...

Prediction is held to be a fundamental process underpinning perception, action, and cognition. To examine the time course of prediction error signaling, we recorded intracranial EEG activity from nine presurgical epileptic patients while they listened to melodies whose information theoretical predictability had been characterized using a computatio...

A field experiment was conducted with a professional busker in the London Underground over the course of 24 days. Its aim was to investigate the extent to which performative aspects influence behavioral responses to music street performances. Two aspects of the performance were manipulated: familiarity of the music (familiar vs. unfamiliar) and bod...

In recent years, the field of neuroaesthetics has gained considerable attention with music being a favored object of study. The majority of studies concerning music have, however, focused on the experience of Western tonal music (TM), which is characterized by tonal hierarchical organization, a high degree of consonance, and a tendency to provide t...

Musicology students are engaged with music on an academic level and usually have an extensive musical background. They have a considerable knowledge of music history and theory and listening to music may be regarded as one of their primary occupations. Taken together, these factors qualify them as ≫expert listeners≪, who may be expected to exhibit...

The number of studies investigating music processing in the human brain continues to increase with a large proportion concerning themselves with the correlates of so-called musical emotions. The current review highlights the recent development whereby such studies are no longer only concerning themselves with basic emotions like happiness and sadne...

Elucidating the cognitive, affective, and reward processes that take place during music listening is the aim of a growing number of researchers. Several authors have used the Bayesian brain framework and existing models of reward to interpret neural activity observed during musical listening. The claims from Friston and colleagues regarding the rol...

The involvement of the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex in the processing of valenced stimuli is well established. However, less is known about the extent to which activity in these regions reflects a stimulus' physical properties, the individual subjective experience it evokes, or both. We recorded cortical electrical activity from five epileptic...

Background and aims: Familiarity is assumed to exert a beneficial effect on memory in older adults. Our paper investigated this issue specifically for destination memory, that is, memory of the destination of previously relayed information. Methods: Young and older adults were told familiar (Experiment 1) and unfamiliar (Experiment 2) proverbs a...

The current review examines the possibility that training-related changes that take place in the brains of musicians may have a beneficial effect on their cognitive outcome and recovery following neurological damage. First, we propose three different mechanisms by which training-related brain changes might result in relatively preserved function in...

Autobiographical recall is thought to rely on the ability to generate a visual image of the remembered event. Neuropsychological studies suggest a relationship between deterioration in visual mental imagery and autobiographical distortions, while neuroimaging data similarly implicate visual brain areas in autobiographical recall. However, neither a...

The processing of valence is known to recruit the amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and relevant sensory areas. However, how these regions interact remains unclear. We recorded cortical electrical activity from 7 epileptic patients implanted with depth electrodes for presurgical evaluation while they listened to positively and negatively valenced mus...

Previous research shows that music exposure can impair a wide variety of cognitive and behavioral performance. We investigated whether this is the case for source memory. Forty-one younger adults and thirty-five healthy elderly were required to retain the location in which pictures of colored objects were displayed. On a subsequent recognition test...

We compared destination memory to source memory in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), as the latter type of memory is believed to be severely deteriorated in AD. Control participants and AD patients were tested on two conditions, both of which had a study phase and a recognition phase. In the study phase of the first condition, participants ha...

Previous research has shown that music exposure can impair a wide variety of cognitive and behavioural performance. We investigated whether this is the case for source memory. Forty-one younger adults and 35 healthy elderly were required to retain the location in which pictures of coloured objects were displayed. On a subsequent recognition test th...

Music listening involves using previously internalized regularities to process incoming musical structures. A condition known as congenital amusia is characterized by musical difficulties, notably in the detection of gross musical violations. However, there has been increasing evidence that individuals with the disorder show preserved musical abili...

individuals with congenital amusia have difficulty recognizing and discriminating melodies. While much research has focused on the perceptual deficits of congenital amusics, the extent to which these deficits have an impact on the ability to engage with and appreciate music remains unexplored. The current study used experience sampling methodology...

Auditory perception involves not only hearing a series of sounds but also making predictions about future ones. For typical listeners, these predictions are formed on the basis of long-term schematic knowledge, gained over a lifetime of exposure to the auditory environment. Individuals with a developmental disorder known as congenital amusia show m...

Congenital amusia is a lifelong disorder whereby individuals have pervasive difficulties in perceiving and producing music. In contrast, typical individuals display a sophisticated understanding of musical structure, even in the absence of musical training. Previous research has shown that they acquire this knowledge implicitly, through exposure to...

It is widely held that the neural representation of faces may be usefully viewed as a multi-dimensional “face-space” with the average at its origin. Under this view the distance between faces encodes their similarity, and distance from the origin encodes general “distinctiveness”. Here we compare objective and subjective measures of distinctiveness...

It has been proposed that faces are represented in the visual brain as points within a multi-dimensional "face space", with the average at its origin. We adapted a psychophysical procedure that measures non-linearities in contrast transduction (by measuring discrimination around different reference/pedestal levels of contrast) to examine the encodi...