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MIB professor Peter Vuust with professors Stefan Koelsch and Karl Friston publish paper in high impact journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Music provides a remarkable ‘epistemic offering’: it continuously satisfies our need to resolve uncertainty, thereby underwriting its rewarding nature.

14.01.2019 | Hella Kastbjerg

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Highlights

  • Music provides a remarkable ‘epistemic offering’: it continuously satisfies our need to resolve uncertainty, thereby underwriting its rewarding nature.
  • Within the predictive coding framework, there are (first-order) predictions of perceptual content and (second-order) predictions of the precision (i.e., confidence or certainty) that are ascribed to first-order predictions.
  • The capacity to update beliefs about precision endows us with the ability to attend selectively to uncertainty resolving, epistemically rewarding streams of information, as exemplified in actively listening to music.
  • We consider the evidence for ‘active listening’ in terms of increased rates of evidence accumulation (i.e., reduced latencies of the early right anterior negativity), when subjects are informed about impending music-syntactic violations.
  • This enactive take on music perception fits comfortably with the notion that our predictions of music are based on how we would generate it ourselves; thereby accounting for the phenomenon of ‘musical groove’.

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ABSTRACT

We suggest that music perception is an active act of listening, providing an irresistible epistemic offering. When listening to music we constantly generate plausible hypotheses about what could happen next, while actively attending to music resolves the ensuing uncertainty. Within the predictive coding framework, we present a novel formulation of precision filtering and attentional selection, which explains why some lower-level auditory, and even higher-level music-syntactic processes elicited by irregular events are relatively exempt from top-down predictive processes. We review findings providing unique evidence for the attentional selection of salient auditory features. This formulation suggests that ‘listening’ is a more active process than traditionally conceived in models of perception.

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.10.006

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Forskning, Forskning, Alle grupper, Musicinthebrain, Musicinthebrain, Navnenyt