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Involuntary musical imagery (INMI; more commonly known as "earworms" or having a song "stuck in your head") is a common musical phenomenon and one of the most salient examples of spontaneous cognition. Despite the ubiquitous nature of INMI in the general population, functional roles of INMI remain to be fully established and characterized. Findings that spontaneous reactivation of mental representationsaids in memory consolidation raise the possibility that INMI also serves in this capacity. In three experiments, we manipulated the probability of experiencing INMI for novel music loops by first exposing participants to these loops during tasks that varied in attentional and sensorimotor demands. We measured INMI for loops and the quality of individual loop memories using different tasks both immediately following exposure and at a delay of 1 week. Across experiments, reduced exposure to music had the largest effect on INMI and loop memory. In Experiments 1 and 2, music encoding was resilient to manipulations of attentional focus; however, in Experiment 3, engaging sequence learning processes with an unrelated task during music exposure reduced the subsequent accuracy of loop memories and the likelihood of experiencing INMI. In each experiment, the amount of INMI experienced for a loop across the delay period predicted improvements in the accuracy of a loop memory over time. We thus provide evidence for a memory-consolidation role for INMI, in which the spontaneous replay of recently encoded music is related to the quality of music encoding and predicts changes in music memory over time.

Motivation for bodily movement, physical activity and exercise varies from moment to moment. These motivation states may be "affectively-charged," ranging from instances of lower tension (e.g., desires, wants) to higher tension (e.g., cravings and urges). Currently, it is not known how often these states have been investigated in clinical populations (e.g., eating disorders, exercise dependence/addiction, Restless Legs Syndrome, diabetes, obesity) vs. healthy populations (e.g., in studies of motor control; groove in music psychology). The objective of this scoping review protocol is to quantify the literature on motivation states, to determine what topical areas are represented in investigations of clinical and healthy populations, and to discover pertinent details, such as instrumentation, terminology, theories, and conceptual models, correlates and mechanisms of action. Iterative searches of scholarly databases will take place to determine which combination of search terms (e.g., "motivation states" and "physical activity"; "desire to be physically active," etc.) captures the greatest number of relevant results. Studies will be included if motivation states for movement (e.g., desires, urges) are specifically measured or addressed. Studies will be excluded if referring to motivation as a trait. A charting data form was developed to scan all relevant documents for later data extraction. The primary outcome is simply the extent of the literature on the topic. Results will be stratified by population/condition. This scoping review will unify a diverse literature, which may result in the creation of unique models or paradigms that can be utilized to better understand motivation for bodily movement and exercise.

WHAT ARE THE FACTORS THAT DETERMINE HOW long a person chooses to listen to an unfamiliar piece of music? We examined this question across three experiments in which we played participants novel repeating multi-instrument stimuli and recorded their listening times and reasons for their decisions to either continue or stop listening. To influence the habituating effects of repeating musical material drawn from a large stimulus library (> 450 items), we manipulated novelty along several musical dimensions. In Experiment 1, all instruments entered simultaneously. In Experiment 2, instrument entrances were also offset in time. In Experiment 3, we composed core multi-instrument loops and manipulated them to further minimize harmonic variability, minimize rhythmic variability, introduce spatia-lization, or change timbral characteristics. Novelty introduced by instrument entrances was the strongest determinant of listening times, though harmonic variability and timbral features were also important. Subjective enjoyment was the best predictor of listening times, mediating the effects of the degree of perceived groove in a stimulus, the urge to move, interest in a stimulus, perceived complexity, and congruency with current mood. We conclude that naturalistic looping musical stimuli serve well to examine the diverse psychological and musical determinants of choice behavior underlying music consumption.

Many environmental sounds, such as music or speech, are patterned in time. Dynamic attending theory, and supporting empirical evidence, suggests that a stimulus's temporal structure serves to orient attention to specific moments in time. One instantiation of this theory posits that attention synchronizes to the temporal structure of a stimulus in an oscillatory fashion, with optimal perception at salient time points or oscillation peaks. We examined whether a model consisting of damped linear oscillators succeeds at predicting temporal attention behavior in rhythmic multi-instrumental music. We conducted 3 experiments in which we mapped listeners' perceptual sensitivity by estimating detection thresholds for intensity deviants embedded at multiple time points within a stimulus pattern. We compared participants' thresholds for detecting intensity changes at various time points with the modeled salience prediction at each of those time points. Across all experiments, results showed that the resonator model predicted listener thresholds, such that listeners were more sensitive to probes at time points corresponding to greater model-predicted salience. This effect held for both intensity increment and decrement probes and for metrically simple and complex stimuli. Moreover, the resonator model explained the data better than did predictions based on canonical metric hierarchy or auditory scene density. Our results offer new insight into the temporal orienting of attention in complex auditory scenes using a parsimonious computational model for predicting attentional dynamics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Classic psychedelic drugs (serotonin 2A, or 5HT2A, receptor agonists) have notable effects on music listening. In the current report, blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal was collected during music listening in 25 healthy adults after administration of placebo, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and LSD pretreated with the 5HT2A antagonist ketanserin, to investigate the role of 5HT2A receptor signaling in the neural response to the time-varying tonal structure of music. Tonality-tracking analysis of BOLD data revealed that 5HT2A receptor signaling alters the neural response to music in brain regions supporting basic and higher-level musical and auditory processing, and areas involved in memory, emotion, and self-referential processing. This suggests a critical role of 5HT2A receptor signaling in supporting the neural tracking of dynamic tonal structure in music, as well as in supporting the associated increases in emotionality, connectedness, and meaningfulness in response to music that are commonly observed after the administration of LSD and other psychedelics. Together, these findings inform the neuropsychopharmacology of music perception and cognition, meaningful music listening experiences, and altered perception of music during psychedelic experiences.

Rhythm is a ubiquitous feature of music that induces specific neural modes of processing. In this paper, we assess the potential of a stimulus-driven linear oscillator model (57) to predict dynamic attention to complex musical rhythms on an instant-by-instant basis. We use perceptual thresholds and pupillometry as attentional indices against which to test our model predictions. During a deviance detection task, participants listened to continuously looping, multiinstrument, rhythmic patterns, while being eye-tracked. Their task was to respond anytime they heard an increase in intensity (dB SPL). An adaptive thresholding algorithm adjusted deviant intensity at multiple probed temporal locations throughout each rhythmic stimulus. The oscillator model predicted participants' perceptual thresholds for detecting deviants at probed locations, with a low temporal salience prediction corresponding to a high perceptual threshold and vice versa. A pupil dilation response was observed for all deviants. Notably, the pupil dilated even when participants did not report hearing a deviant. Maximum pupil size and resonator model output were significant predictors of whether a deviant was detected or missed on any given trial. Besides the evoked pupillary response to deviants, we also assessed the continuous pupillary signal to the rhythmic patterns. The pupil exhibited entrainment at prominent periodicities present in the stimuli and followed each of the different rhythmic patterns in a unique way. Overall, these results replicate previous studies using the linear oscillator model to predict dynamic attention to complex auditory scenes and extend the utility of the model to the prediction of neurophysiological signals, in this case the pupillary time course; however, we note that the amplitude envelope of the acoustic patterns may serve as a similarly useful predictor. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to show entrainment of pupil dynamics by demonstrating a phase relationship between musical stimuli and the pupillary signal.

Nostalgia is an emotion that is most commonly associated with personally and socially relevant memories. It is primarily positive in valence and is readily evoked by music. It is also an idiosyncratic experience that varies between individuals based on affective traits. We identified frontal, limbic, paralimbic, and midbrain brain regions in which the strength of the relationship between ratings of nostalgia evoked by music and blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signal was predicted by affective personality measures (nostalgia proneness and the sadness scale of the Affective Neuroscience Personality Scales) that are known to modulate the strength of nostalgic experiences. We also identified brain areas including the inferior frontal gyrus, substantia nigra, cerebellum, and insula in which time-varying BOLD activity correlated more strongly with the time-varying tonal structure of nostalgia-evoking music than with music that evoked no or little nostalgia. These findings illustrate one way in which the reward and emotion regulation networks of the brain are recruited during the experiencing of complex emotional experiences triggered by music. These findings also highlight the importance of considering individual differences when examining the neural responses to strong and idiosyncratic emotional experiences. Finally, these findings provide a further demonstration of the use of time-varying stimulus-specific information in the investigation of music-evoked experiences.

Music often evokes spontaneous movements in listeners that are synchronized with the music, a phenomenon that has been characterized as being in "the groove." However, the musical factors that contribute to listeners' initiation of stimulus-coupled action remain unclear. Evidence suggests that newly appearing objects in auditory scenes orient listeners' attention, and that in multipart music, newly appearing instrument or voice parts can engage listeners' attention and elicit arousal. We posit that attentional engagement with music can influence listeners' spontaneous stimulus-coupled movement. Here, 2 experiments-involving participants with and without musical training-tested the effect of staggering instrument entrances across time and varying the number of concurrent instrument parts within novel multipart music on listeners' engagement with the music, as assessed by spontaneous sensorimotor behavior and self-reports. Experiment 1 assessed listeners' moment-to-moment ratings of perceived groove, and Experiment 2 examined their spontaneous tapping and head movements. We found that, for both musically trained and untrained participants, music with more instruments led to higher ratings of perceived groove, and that music with staggered instrument entrances elicited both increased sensorimotor coupling and increased reports of perceived groove. Although untrained participants were more likely to rate music as higher in groove, trained participants showed greater propensity for tapping along, and they did so more accurately. The quality of synchronization of head movements with the music, however, did not differ as a function of training. Our results shed new light on the relationship between complex musical scenes, attention, and spontaneous sensorimotor behavior.

Listeners' expectations for melodies and harmonies in tonal music are perhaps the most studied aspect of music cognition. Long debated has been whether faster response times (RTs) to more strongly primed events (in a music theoretic sense) are driven by sensory or cognitive mechanisms, such as repetition of sensory information or activation of cognitive schemata that reflect learned tonal knowledge, respectively. We analyzed over 300 stimuli from 7 priming experiments comprising a broad range of musical material, using a model that transforms raw audio signals through a series of plausible physiological and psychological representations spanning a sensory-cognitive continuum. We show that RTs are modeled, in part, by information in periodicity pitch distributions, chroma vectors, and activations of tonal space--a representation on a toroidal surface of the major/minor key relationships in Western tonal music. We show that in tonal space, melodies are grouped by their tonal rather than timbral properties, whereas the reverse is true for the periodicity pitch representation. While tonal space variables explained more of the variation in RTs than did periodicity pitch variables, suggesting a greater contribution of cognitive influences to tonal expectation, a stepwise selection model contained variables from both representations and successfully explained the pattern of RTs across stimulus categories in 4 of the 7 experiments. The addition of closure--a cognitive representation of a specific syntactic relationship--succeeded in explaining results from all 7 experiments. We conclude that multiple representational stages along a sensory-cognitive continuum combine to shape tonal expectations in music.

The medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) is regarded as a region of the brain that supports self-referential processes, including the integration of sensory information with self-knowledge and the retrieval of autobiographical information. I used functional magnetic resonance imaging and a novel procedure for eliciting autobiographical memories with excerpts of popular music dating to one's extended childhood to test the hypothesis that music and autobiographical memories are integrated in the MPFC. Dorsal regions of the MPFC (Brodmann area 8/9) were shown to respond parametrically to the degree of autobiographical salience experienced over the course of individual 30 s excerpts. Moreover, the dorsal MPFC also responded on a second, faster timescale corresponding to the signature movements of the musical excerpts through tonal space. These results suggest that the dorsal MPFC associates music and memories when we experience emotionally salient episodic memories that are triggered by familiar songs from our personal past. MPFC acted in concert with lateral prefrontal and posterior cortices both in terms of tonality tracking and overall responsiveness to familiar and autobiographically salient songs. These findings extend the results of previous autobiographical memory research by demonstrating the spontaneous activation of an autobiographical memory network in a naturalistic task with low retrieval demands.

We examined the pitch and temporal acuity of auditory expectations/images formed under attentional-cuing and imagery task conditions, in order to address whether auditory expectations and auditory images are functionally equivalent. Across three experiments, we observed that pitch acuity was comparable between the two task conditions, whereas temporal acuity deteriorated in the imagery task. A fourth experiment indicated that the observed pitch acuity could not be attributed to implicit influences of the primed context alone. Across the experiments, image acuity in both pitch and time was better in listeners with more musical training. The results support a view that auditory images are multifaceted and that their acuity along any given dimension depends partially on the context in which they are formed.

Properties of auditory working memory for sounds that lack strong semantic associations and are not readily verbalized or sung are poorly understood. We investigated auditory working memory capacity for lists containing 2-6 easily discriminable abstract sounds synthesized within a constrained timbral space, at delays of 1-6 s (Experiment 1), and the effect of greater perceptual variability among list items on capacity estimates at delays of 1-6 s (Experiment 2). Working memory capacity estimates of 1-2 items were found in all conditions and increased significantly as the perceptual variability among the list items increased. Nonetheless, the capacity estimates were smaller than the commonly observed average working memory capacity limit of 3-5 items. Decay profiles in both experiments were comparable with those previously reported in the verbal and auditory working memory literature. The results help define boundary conditions on capacity estimates for nonverbalizable timbres that lack strong long-term memory associations. (Contains 2 tables, 4 figures and 1 footnote.)

Harmonic priming studies have shown that a musical context with its tonal center influences target chord processing. In comparison with targets following baseline contexts, which do not establish a specific tonal center, processing is facilitated for a strongly related target functioning as the tonic, but inhibited for unrelated (out-of-key) and less related (subdominant) targets. This study investigated cost and benefit patterns for the processing of the 3 most important chords of the harmonic hierarchy. Response time patterns reflected the chords' ranking: Processing was fastest for the tonic, followed by the dominant, and then the subdominant. The comparison with baseline contexts replicated the benefit of processing for tonic targets (Experiments 1 and 3) and the cost of processing for subdominant targets (Experiment 3), while dominant targets were situated at baseline level (Experiments 1 to 3). Findings indicate that listeners implicitly understand fine differences in tonal stabilities and confirm the special status of the tonic being the most expected and solely facilitated chord at the end of a tonal context. Findings are discussed with references to sensory and cognitive approaches of music perception. (Contains 7 footnotes, 5 figures, and 3 tables.)

Harmonic priming studies have shown that a musical context, with its established tonal center, influences target chord processing. This study investigated costs and benefits of priming tonal centers for target processing by adding a baseline condition (sequences without a specific tonal center). Results confirmed harmonic priming, with faster processing for related than for unrelated and less related targets (tonic chord, out-of-key chord, subdominant chord). Comparing targets in baseline contexts with targets in sequences with well-established tonal centers revealed a benefit of processing for related targets but a cost of processing for unrelated and less related targets. Findings are discussed in terms of tonal knowledge activation and suggest that an activated tonal center gives rise to strong expectations for the tonic.