Pablo RipollésNew York University | NYU · Department of Psychology
Pablo Ripollés
Cognitive Neuroscience
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93
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Introduction
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Education
September 2009 - December 2010
September 2004 - June 2009
Publications
Publications (93)
Humans constantly learn in the absence of explicit rewards. However, the neurobiological mechanisms supporting this type of internally-guided learning (without explicit feedback) are still unclear. Here, participants who completed a task in which no external reward/feedback was provided, exhibited enhanced fMRI-signals within the dopaminergic midbr...
The exact neural processes behind humans' drive to acquire a new language-first as infants and later as second-language learners-are yet to be established. Recent theoretical models have proposed that during human evolution, emerging language-learning mechanisms might have been glued to phylogenetically older subcortical reward systems [1], reinfor...
Novel rehabilitation interventions have improved
motor recovery by induction of neural plasticity in individuals
with stroke. Of these, Music-supported therapy (MST) is
based on music training designed to restore motor deficits.
Music training requires multimodal processing, involving
the integration and co-operation of visual, motor, auditory,
aff...
SoundSignature is a music application that integrates a custom OpenAI Assistant to analyze users' favorite songs. The system incorporates state-of-the-art Music Information Retrieval (MIR) Python packages to combine extracted acoustic/musical features with the assistant's extensive knowledge of the artists and bands. Capitalizing on this combined k...
The relationship between musical training and intellect is controversial. A new hypothesis may help resolve the debate by proposing an explanation for how training in rhythmic skills can improve cognitive abilities in some individuals, but not others.
Music provides a reward that can enhance learning and motivation in humans. While music is often combined with exercise to improve performance and upregulate mood, the relationship between music-induced reward and motor output is poorly understood. Here, we study music reward and motor output at the same time by capitalizing on music playing. Speci...
Combinatoric linguistic operations underpin human language processes, but how meaning is composed and refined in the mind of the reader is not well understood. We address this puzzle by exploiting the ubiquitous function of negation. We track the online effects of negation (“not”) and intensifiers (“really”) on the representation of scalar adjectiv...
Music and social interactions represent two of the most important sources of pleasure in our lives, both engaging the mesolimbic dopaminergic system. However, there is limited understanding regarding whether and how sharing a musical activity in a social context influences and modifies individuals’ rewarding experiences. Here, we aimed at (1) modul...
Relatively little work has focused on why we are motivated to learn words. In adults, recent experiments have shown that intrinsic reward signals accompany successful word learning from context. In addition, the experience of reward facilitated long‐term memory for words. In adolescence, developmental changes are seen in reward and motivation syste...
While certain musical genres and songs are widely popular, there is still large variability in the music that individuals find rewarding or emotional, even among those with a similar musical enculturation. Interestingly, there is one Western genre that is intended to attract minimal attention and evoke a mild emotional response: elevator music. In...
Relatively little work has focused on why we are motivated to learn words. In adults, a new series of experiments has shown that intrinsic reward signals accompany successful word learning from context. In addition, this experience of reward facilitated long-term memory for words. In adolescence, developmental changes are seen in both reward and mo...
The McGurk effect refers to an audiovisual speech illusion where the discrepant auditory and visual syllables produce a fused percept between the visual and auditory component. However, little is known about how individual differences contribute to the McGurk effect. Here, we examined whether music training experience—which involves audiovisual int...
Music can evoke powerful emotions in the listener. An open question is whether instrumental music conveys extra-musical meanings above and beyond emotions. We conducted an online study where 121 participants listened to 20 15-second-long excerpts of instrumental soundtrack music and reported perceived emotions (e.g., happiness, sadness) as well as...
What role do the emotions of subject and object play in judging the beauty of images and music? Eighty-one participants rated perceived beauty, liking, perceived happiness, and perceived sadness of 24 songs, 12 art images, and 12 nature photographs. Stimulus presentation was brief (2 seconds) or prolonged (20 seconds). The stimuli were presented in...
Music provides an abstract reward that can enhance learning and motivation in humans. While music is often combined with exercise to improve performance and to upregulate mood, the relationship between music-induced reward and motor output is poorly understood. Here, we study music reward and motor output at the same time by capitalizing on music p...
Music is a fundamental aspect of human existence, permeating all societies and recognized as a highly engaging, enjoyable, and emotionally moving activity. While the positive influence of music on mood and well-being is well-established, its effects on cognitive functioning, particularly attention modulation, remain less understood. Given the commo...
Previous studies investigating common melodic contour shapes have relied on methodologies that require prior assumptions regarding the expected contour patterns. Here, a new approach for examining contour using dimensionality reduction and unsupervised machine-learning clustering methods is presented. This new methodology was tested across four set...
Incentives can decrease performance by undermining intrinsic motivation. How such an interplay of external reinforcers and internal self-regulation influences memory processes, however, is less known. Here, we investigated their interaction on memory performance while learning the meaning of new-words from their context. Specifically, participants...
Growing literature has identified the social dimension as one of the crucial mechanisms behindmusical pleasure. However, the effect of the social context on the emotional experience associated with music remains unclear. Indeed, some previous studies observed no significant differences between listening to music in a group and alone in terms of emo...
The COVID‐19 pandemic has deeply affected the mental health of millions of people. We assessed which of many leisure activities correlated with positive mental health outputs, with particular attention to music, which has been reported to be important for coping with the psychological burden of the pandemic. Questionnaire data from about 1000 indiv...
Combining words and composing meanings is at the basis of human language. However, how the brain constructs meaning online is not well understood. We develop an approach to address this puzzle that exploits the ubiquitous operation of negation. Although negation has been extensively debated among philosophers, psychologists, logicians, and linguist...
The perceptual evaluation of the Audio Augmented Reality (AAR) experience is typically conducted using authenticity or plausibility as a measure of realism of the sounds. The previous studies usually employed methodologies where participants were comparing the exact reference with real sound. This paper proposes a novel experimental design where pa...
People of all ages display the ability to detect and learn from patterns in seemingly random stimuli. Referred to as statistical learning (SL), this process is particularly critical when learning a spoken language, helping in the identification of discrete words within a spoken phrase. Here, by considering individual differences in speech auditory–...
The ability to synchronize a motor action to a rhythmic auditory stimulus is often considered an innate human skill. However, some individuals lack the ability to synchronize speech to a perceived syllabic rate. Here, we describe a simple and fast protocol to classify a single native English speaker as being or not being a speech synchronizer. This...
Stuttering is a neurodevelopmental speech disorder associated with motor timing that differs from non-stutterers. While neurodevelopmental disorders impacted by timing are associated with compromised auditory-motor integration and interoception, the interplay between those abilities and stuttering remains unexplored. Here, we studied the relationsh...
Previous studies show that word learning can be intrinsically rewarding, even the absence of external feedback or incentives. Intrinsic reward activates the brain’s reward-memory circuit, leading to enhanced memory for words people enjoyed learning. However, existing studies have tested word learning through encountering written word forms (i.e., t...
Distinguishing between regular and irregular heartbeats, conversing with speakers of different accents, and tuning a guitar-all rely on some form of auditory learning. What drives these experience-dependent changes? A growing body of evidence suggests an important role for non-sensory influences, including reward, task engagement, and social or lin...
The current work seeks to characterize a unique genre of music, elevator music (Muzak), using behavioral crowd-sourcing data from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Participants rated excerpts of elevator music along with more rewarding genres of music for pleasure, valence, familiarity, and recognition. Our results demonstrate that elevator music is rated as...
Background: To determine and compare lesion patterns and structural dysconnectivity underlying post-stroke aprosodia and amusia, using a data-driven multimodal neuroimaging approach.
Methods: Thirty-nine patients with right or left hemisphere stroke were enrolled in a cohort study and tested for linguistic and affective prosody perception and musi...
Statistical learning (SL) is the ability to extract regularities from the environment. In the domain of language, this ability is fundamental in the learning of words and structural rules. In lack of reliable online measures, statistical word and rule learning have been primarily investigated using offline (post-familiarization) tests, which gives...
Music listening provides one of the most significant abstract rewards for humans because hearing music activates the dopaminergic mesolimbic system. Given the strong link between reward, dopamine, and memory, we aimed here to investigate the hypothesis that dopamine‐dependent musical reward can drive memory improvements. Twenty‐nine healthy partici...
Recently, we provided causal evidence that self-regulated dopamine signaling enhanced long-term memory formation in the absence of any external feedback or reward (Ripollés et al., 2016, 2018) if a congruent meaning inferred from semantic context (DA-dependent learning), while DA-signals were absent if no congruent meaning could be inferred (DA-ind...
The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures taken to mitigate its impact (e.g., confinement orders) have affected people's lives in profound ways that would have been unimagable only months before the pandemic began. Media reports from the height of the pandemic's initial international surge frequently highlighted that many people were engaging in music...
Listening to vocal music has been recently shown to improve language recovery in stroke survivors. The neuroplasticity mechanisms supporting this effect are, however, still unknown. Using data from a three-arm, single-blind, randomized controlled trial including acute stroke patients ( N = 38) and a 3 month follow-up, we set out to compare the neur...
Statistical learning (SL) is the ability to extract regularities from the environment. In the domain of language, this ability is fundamental in the learning of words and structural rules. In lack of reliable online measures, statistical word and rule learning have been primarily investigated using offline (post-familiarization) tests, which gives...
The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply affected mental health. We assessed which of many leisure activities had positive psychological effects, with particular attention to music, which has been reported anecdotally to be important. Questionnaire data from over a thousand individuals primarily from Italy, Spain, and the USA during spring 2020 show that p...
A crucial aspect when learning a language is discovering the rules that govern how words are combined in order to convey meanings. Because rules are characterized by sequential co-occurrences between elements (e.g., “These cupcakes are unbelievable”), tracking the statistical relationships between these elements is fundamental. However, purely bott...
Objective: Previous studies suggest that daily music listening can aid stroke recovery, but little is known about the stimulus-dependent and neural mechanisms driving this effect. Building on neuroimaging evidence that vocal music engages extensive and bilateral networks in the brain, we sought to determine if it would be more effective for enhanci...
The human hippocampus is believed to be a crucial node in the neural network supporting autobiographical memory retrieval. Structural mesial temporal damage associated with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) provides an opportunity to systematically investigate and better understand the local and distal functional consequences of mesial temporal damage i...
The ability to extract regularities from the environment is arguably an adaptive characteristic of intelligent systems. In the context of speech, statistical word-learning is thought to be an important mechanism for language acquisition. By taking into account individual differences in speech auditory-motor synchronization, an independent component...
Previously, we provided causal evidence for a dopamine-dependent effect of intrinsic reward on memory during self-regulated learning (Ripollés et al., 2016; Ripollés et al., 2018). Here, we further investigated the dopamine-dependent link between reward and memory by focusing on one of the most iconic abstract rewards in humans: music. Twenty-nine...
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fnint.2019.00028.].
Listening to white noise may facilitate cognitive performance, including new word learning, for some individuals. This study investigated whether auditory white noise facilitates the learning of novel written words from context in healthy young adults. Sixty-nine participants were required to determine the meaning of novel words placed within sente...
A crucial aspect when learning a language is discovering the rules that govern how words are combined in order to convey meanings. Since rules are characterized by sequential co-occurrences between elements (e.g. ' These cupcake sareun believ able '), tracking the statistical relationships between these elements is fundamental. However, statistical...
Brain imaging methods have contributed to shed light on the mechanisms of recovery after early brain insult. The assumption that the unaffected right hemisphere can take over language functions after left perinatal stroke is still under debate. Here, we report how patterns of brain structural and functional reorganization were associated with langu...
The ability to perceive and produce music is a quintessential element of human life, present in all known cultures. Modern functional neuroimaging has revealed that music listening activates a large-scale bilateral network of cortical and subcortical regions in the healthy brain. Even the most accurate structural studies do not reveal which brain a...
The lateralization of neuronal processing underpinning hearing, speech, language, and music is widely studied, vigorously debated, and still not understood in a satisfactory manner. One set of hypotheses focuses on the temporal structure of perceptual experience and links auditory cortex asymmetries to underlying differences in neural populations w...
We introduce a deceptively simple behavioral task that robustly identifies two qualitatively different groups within the general population. When presented with an isochronous train of random syllables, some listeners are compelled to align their own concurrent syllable production with the perceived rate, whereas others remain impervious to the ext...
Significance
In everyday life humans regularly seek participation in highly complex and pleasurable experiences such as music listening, singing, or playing, that do not seem to have any specific survival advantage. The question addressed here is to what extent dopaminergic transmission plays a direct role in the reward experience (both motivationa...
Background:
Despite dietary intervention, individuals with early treated phenylketonuria (ETPKU) could present neurocognitive deficits and white matter (WM) abnormalities. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the microstructural integrity of WM pathways across the whole brain in a cohort of paediatric ETPKU patients compared with healthy c...
We recently provided evidence that an intrinsic reward-related signal-triggered by successful learning in absence of any external feedback-modulated the entrance of new information into long-term memory via the activation of the dopaminergic midbrain, hippocampus, and ventral striatum (the SN/VTA-Hippocampal loop; Ripollés et al., 2016). Here, we u...
We recently provided evidence that an intrinsic reward-related signal-triggered by successful learning in absence of any external feedback-modulated the entrance of new information into long-term memory via the activation of the dopaminergic midbrain, hippocampus, and ventral striatum (the SN/VTA-Hippocampal loop; Ripollé s et al., 2016). Here, we...
We recently provided evidence that an intrinsic reward-related signal — triggered by successful learning in absence of any external feedback — modulated the entrance of new information into long-term memory via the activation of the dopaminergic midbrain, hippocampus, and ventral striatum (the SN/VTA-Hippocampal loop; Ripollés et al., 2016). Here,...
The present study aimed to explore the functional connectivity differences in Resting State Networks (RSNs) induced by cancer and chemotherapy in Lung Cancer (LC) patients using an Independent Component Analysis (ICA). Three matched groups of 15 LC patients following Chemotherapy (C+), 15 LC patients before Chemotherapy (C-) and 15 Healthy Controls...
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a disabling and difficult-to-treat mental disease. One of its core features is a significant difficulty in affect regulation, which is often accompanied by Non-Suicidal Self-Injury (NSSI). It is suggested that this type of behavior elicits positive emotions and mitigates emotional distress, and therefore can...
Brain damage causing acquired amusia disrupts the functional music processing system, creating a unique opportunity to investigate the critical neural architectures of musical processing in the brain. In this longitudinal fMRI study of stroke patients (N = 41) with a 6-month follow-up, we used natural vocal music (sung with lyrics) and instrumental...
Background:
The main aim of this study was to identify which glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) patients have a higher risk to present seizures during follow-up.
Methods:
Patients with newly diagnosed GBM were reviewed (n=306), and classified in patients with (Group 1) and without (Group 2) seizures at onset. Group 2 was split into patients with seiz...
Learning the associations between words and meanings is a fundamental human ability. Although the language network is cortically well defined, the role of the white matter pathways supporting novel word-to-meaning mappings remains unclear. Here, by using contextual and cross-situational word-learning, we tested whether learning the meaning of a new...