seunggookim/monkey_eeg_music

monkey_eeg_music

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•     Neural encoding of musical expectations in a non-human primate
  

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General Description

This set of scripts reports the analysis scripts for eeg and pupillometry data for the publication "Neural encoding of musical expectations in a non-human primate".

Authors

Roberta Bianco, Nathaniel J. Zuk, Félix Bigand, Eros Quarta, Stefano Grasso, Flavia Arnese, Andrea Ravignani, Alexandra Battaglia-Mayer, Giacomo Novembre

Summary

The appreciation of music is a universal trait of humankind. Evidence supporting this notion includes the ubiquity of music across cultures and the natural predisposition towards music that humans display early in development. Are we musical animals because of species-specific predispositions? This question cannot be answered by relying on cross-cultural or developmental studies alone, as these cannot rule out enculturation. Instead, it calls for cross-species experiments testing whether homologous neural mechanisms underlying music perception are present in our closest relatives, non-human primates. We present music to two rhesus monkeys, reared without musical exposure, while recording electroencephalography (EEG) and pupillometry. Monkeys not only engage more when listening to real classical music, as opposed to shuffled controls, but they also generate expectations based on the previously seeded musical context. We then compare human and monkey neural responses to the same stimuli and find a species-dependent contribution of two fundamental musical features – pitch and timing – in generating expectations: whilst timing and pitch-based expectations are similarly weighted in humans, monkeys rely strongly on timing rather than pitch. Lastly, timing-based expectations are based on a musical context that is shorter in monkeys than in humans. Together, these results shed light on the phylogeny of music perception. They highlight structural processing capacities in monkeys beyond plain acoustic processing, and they identify species-dependent contribution of time- and pitch- related features to the neural encoding of musical expectations.

Keywords

Music, macaques, humans, cross-species comparison, predictions, surprise, Prediction by Partial Matching (PPM), electroencephalography (EEG), Event-related potential (ERP), Temporal response function (TRF), auditory memory

USE

The dataset will be avilable upon publication on the repositiry Dateverse XXX that contains monkey data: .tab and .mat files for 2 monkeys, and each condition AND result data from 20 human data. The original human data are available at https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.g1jwstqmh.