Giacomo Novembre

Italian Institute of Technology, Rome · Neuroscience of Perception and Action

Humans are assumed to have a natural-universal-predisposition for making music and for musical interaction. Research in this domain is, however, typically conducted with musically trained individuals, and therefore confounded with expertise. Here, we present a rediscovered and updated invention-the E-music box-that we establish as an empirical meth...

Survival in a fast-changing environment requires animals not only to detect unexpected sensory events, but also to react. In humans, these salient sensory events generate large electrocortical responses, which have been traditionally interpreted within the sensory domain. Here we describe a basic physiological mechanism coupling saliency-related co...

Brains that work together, couple together through interbrain synchrony. Does interbrain synchrony causally facilitate social interaction? This question cannot be answered by simply recording from multiple brains (hyperscanning). It instead requires causal protocols entailing their simultaneous stimulation (multibrain stimulation). We highlight pro...

Social interactive learning denotes the ability to acquire new information from a conspecific – a prerequisite for cultural evolution and survival. As inspired by recent neurophysiological research, here we tested whether social interactive learning can be augmented by exogenously synchronizing oscillatory brain activity across an instructor and a...

A growing body of research shows that the universal capacity for music perception and production emerges early in development. Possibly building on this predisposition, caregivers around the world often communicate with infants using songs or speech entailing song-like characteristics. This suggests that music might be one of the earliest developin...

Sudden and surprising sensory events trigger neural processes that swiftly adjust behavior. To study the phylogenesis and the mechanism of this phenomenon, we trained two rhesus monkeys to keep a cursor inside a visual target by exerting force on an isometric joystick. We examined the effect of surprising auditory stimuli on exerted force, scalp el...

Interpersonal movement synchrony (IMS) is central to social behavior in several species. In humans, IMS is typically studied using structured tasks requiring participants to produce specific body movements. Instead, spontaneously generated (i.e., not instructed) movements have received less attention. To test whether spontaneous movements synchroni...

Inhibition is a key cognitive control mechanism. When rapidly exerted, inhibitory control has broad, non-selective motor effects, typically demonstrated using cortico-spinal excitability measurements (CSE) elicited by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). For example, during rapid action-stopping, CSE is suppressed at both stopped and task-unrel...

Joint music performance requires flexible sensorimotor coordination between self and other. Cognitive and sensory parameters of joint action—such as shared knowledge or temporal (a)synchrony—influence this coordination by shifting the balance between self-other segregation and integration. To investigate the neural bases of these parameters and the...

The study of the brain mechanisms underpinning social behavior is currently undergoing a paradigm shift, moving its focus from single individuals to the real-time interaction among groups of individuals. Although this development opens unprecedented opportunities to study how interpersonal brain activity shapes behaviors through learning, there hav...

When people interact with each other, their brains synchronize. However, it remains unclear whether interbrain synchrony (IBS) is functionally relevant for social interaction or stems from exposure of individual brains to identical sensorimotor information. To disentangle these views, the current dual-EEG study investigated amplitude-based IBS in p...

Complex sequential behaviors, such as speaking or playing music, entail flexible rule-based chaining of single acts. However, it remains unclear how the brain translates abstract structural rules into movements. We combined music production with multimodal neuroimaging to dissociate high-level structural and low-level motor planning. Pianists playe...

Abrupt increases of sensory input (onsets) likely reflect the occurrence of novel events or objects in the environment, potentially requiring immediate behavioral responses. Accordingly, onsets elicit a transient and widespread modulation of ongoing electrocortical activity: the Vertex Potential (VP), which is likely related to the optimisation of...

The ability to distinguish between an individual's own actions and those of another person is a requirement for successful joint action, particularly in domains such as group music making where precise interpersonal coordination ensures perceptual overlap in the effects of co-performers' actions. We tested the hypothesis that such coordination bene...

Surviving in natural environments requires animals to sense sudden events and swiftly adapt behaviour accordingly. The study of such Reactive Adaptive Behaviour (RAB) has been central to a number of research streams, all orbiting around movement science but progressing in parallel, with little cross-field fertilization. We provide a concise review...

The study of the brain mechanisms underpinning social behavior is currently undergoing a paradigm shift, moving its focus from single individuals to the real-time interaction among groups of individuals. Although this development opens unprecedented opportunities to study how interpersonal brain activity shapes behaviors through learning, there hav...

During joint action, the sense of agency enables interaction partners to implement corrective and adaptive behaviour in response to performance errors. When agency becomes ambiguous (e.g., when action similarity encourages perceptual self-other overlap), confusion as to who produced what may disrupt this process. The current experiment investigated...

Surviving in a natural environment requires animals to sense sudden events and swiftly adapt behaviour accordingly. Such Reactive Adaptive Behaviour (RAB) has been characterized within a number of research fields, all orbiting around movement science but progressing in parallel, with little or no cross-field fertilization. We provide a concise revi...

Spatial EEG filters are widely used to isolate event-related potential (ERP) components. The most commonly used spatial filters (e.g. the Average Reference and the Surface Laplacian) are stationary. Stationary filters are conceptually simple, easy to use and fast to compute, but all assume that the EEG signal does not change across sensors and time...

Complex sequential behaviours, such as speaking or playing music, often entail the flexible, rule-based chaining of single acts. However, it remains unclear how the brain translates abstract structural rules into concrete series of movements. Here we demonstrate a multi-level contribution of anatomically distinct cognitive and motor networks to the...

Living in rapidly changing environments has shaped the mammalian brain toward high sensitivity to abrupt and intense sensory events-often signaling threats or affordances requiring swift reactions. Unsurprisingly, such events elicit a widespread electrocortical response (the vertex potential, VP), likely related to the preparation of appropriate be...

Nervous systems exploit regularities in the sensory environment to predict sensory input, adjust behavior, and thereby maximize fitness. Entrainment of neural oscillations allows retaining temporal regularities of sensory information, a prerequisite for prediction. Entrainment has been extensively described at the frequencies of periodic inputs mos...

Social interactive learning denotes the ability to acquire new information from a conspecific – a prerequisite for cultural evolution and survival. As inspired by recent neurophysiological research, here we tested whether social interactive learning can be augmented by exogenously synchronizing oscillatory brain activity across an instructor and a...

Nervous systems exploit regularities in the sensory environment to predict sensory input and adjust behavior, and thereby maximize fitness. Entrainment of neural oscillations allows retaining temporal regularities of sensory information, a prerequisite for prediction. Entrainment has been extensively described at the frequencies of periodic inputs...

Coordinated behavior promotes collaboration among humans. To shed light upon this relationship, we investigated whether and how interpersonal coordination is promoted by empathic perspective taking (EPT). In a joint music-making task, pairs of participants rotated electronic music-boxes, producing two streams of musical sounds that were meant to be...

Survival in a suddenly-changing environment requires animals not only to detect salient stimuli, but also to promptly respond to them by initiating or revising ongoing motor processes. We recently discovered that the large vertex brain potentials elicited by sudden supramodal stimuli are strongly coupled with a multiphasic modulation of isometric f...

Subcortical reflexive motor responses are under continuous cortical control to produce the most effective behaviour. For example, the excitability of brainstem circuitry subserving the defensive hand-blink reflex (HBR), a response elicited by intense somatosensory stimuli to the wrist, depends on a number of properties of the eliciting stimulus. Th...

Defensive motor responses elicited by sudden environmental stimuli are finely modulated by their behavioural relevance to maximise the organism's survival. One such response, the blink reflex evoked by intense electrical stimulation of the median nerve (Hand-Blink Reflex; HBR), has been extensively used to derive fine-grained maps of defensive peri...

Key points: Salient and sudden sensory events generate a remarkably large response in the human brain, the vertex wave (VW). The VW is coupled with a modulation of a voluntarily-applied isometric force. In the present study, we tested whether the VW is also related to executing high-precision movements. The execution of a voluntary high-precision...

In this chapter, the relationship between music and action is examined from two perspectives: one where individuals learn to play an instrument, and another where music induces movement in a listener. For both perspectives, we review experimental research, mostly consisting of neuroscientific studies, as well as select behavioral investigations. We...

It is well established that musical training induces sensorimotor plasticity. However, there are remarkable differences in how musicians train for proficient stage performance. The present EEG study outlines for the first time clear-cut neurobiological differences between classical and jazz musicians at high and low levels of action planning, revea...

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Human interaction through music is a vital part of social life across cultures. Influential accounts of the evolutionary origins of music favor cooperative functions related to social cohesion or competitive functions linked to sexual selection. However, work on non-human “chorusing” displays, as produced by congregations of male insects and frogs...

Spontaneous modulations of corticospinal excitability during action observation have been interpreted as evidence for the activation of internal motor representations equivalent to the observed action. Alternatively or complementary to this perspective, growing evidence shows that motor activity during observation of rhythmic movements can be modul...

Spontaneous modulations of corticospinal excitability during action observation have been interpreted as evidence for the activation of internal motor representations equivalent to the observed action. Alternatively or complementary to this perspective, growing evidence shows that motor activity during observation of rhythmic movements can be modul...

Human rhythmic movements spontaneously entrain to external rhythmic stimuli. Such sensory-motor entrainment can attract movements to different tempi and enhance their efficiency, with potential clinical applications for motor rehabilitation. Here we investigate whether entrainment of self-paced rhythmic movements can be induced via transcranial alt...

Synchronous movement is a key component of social behaviour in several species including humans. Recent theories have suggested a link between interpersonal synchrony of brain oscillations and interpersonal movement synchrony. The present study investigated this link. Using transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) applied over the left m...

Socially situated thought and behaviour are pervasive and vitally important in human society. The social brain has become a focus of study for researchers in the neurosciences, psychology, biology and other areas of behavioural science, and it is becoming increasingly clear that social behaviour is heavily dependent on shared representations. Any s...

The ability to predict upcoming structured events based on long-term knowledge and contextual priors is a fundamental principle of human cognition. Tonal music triggers predictive processes based on structural properties of harmony, i.e., regularities defining the arrangement of chords into well-formed musical sequences. While the neural architectu...

Significance statement: Even during passive observation, seeing or hearing somebody execute an action from within our repertoire activates motor cortices of our brain. But what is the functional relevance of such "motor simulation"? By combining a musical duet task with a real-time repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation protocol, we provide...

Complex human behavior is hierarchically organized. Whether or not syntax plays a role in this organization is currently under debate. The present ERP study uses piano performance to isolate syntactic operations in action planning and to demonstrate their priority over nonsyntactic levels of movement selection. Expert pianists were asked to execute...

Humans are innately social creatures, but cognitive neuroscience, that has traditionally focused on individual brains, is only now beginning to investigate social cognition through realistic interpersonal interaction. Music provides an ideal domain for doing so because it offers a promising solution for balancing the trade-off between ecological va...

Human interaction often requires simultaneous precision and flexibility in the coordination of rhythmic behaviour between individuals engaged in joint activity, for example, playing a musical duet or dancing with a partner. This review article addresses the psychological processes and brain mechanisms that enable such rhythmic interpersonal coordin...

Experience with a sensorimotor task, such as practicing a piano piece, leads to strong coupling of sensory (visual or auditory) and motor cortices. Here we review behavioral and neurophysiological (M/EEG, TMS and fMRI) research exploring this topic using the brain of musicians as a model system. Our review focuses on a recent body of evidence sugge...

Question Joint action is grounded in the ability to integrate simultaneous self-and other-related behaviour in real time. We investigated whether this function is underpinned by motor simulation, i.e. the capacity to represent a perceived action in terms of the neural resources required to execute it (Jeannerod, 2000). This was tested in a music pe...

Joint actions require the integration of simultaneous self- and other-related behaviour. Here we investigated whether this function is underpinned by motor simulation, i.e. the capacity to represent a perceived action in terms of the neural resources required to execute it. This was tested in a music performance experiment wherein on-line brain sti...

Groove is often described as a musical quality that can induce movement in a listener. This study examines the effects of listening to groove music on corticospinal excitability. Musicians and non-musicians listened to high-groove music, low-groove music, and spectrally matched noise, while receiving single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (...

The capacity to distinguish between one's own and others' behavior is a cognitive prerequisite for successful joint action. We employed a musical joint action task to investigate how the brain achieves this distinction. Pianists performed the right-hand part of piano pieces, previously learned bimanually, while the complementary left-hand part eith...