Neural correlates of expectation of musical termination structure or cadence.

Music is an essential communication tool that can convey emotional information. Segmentation of a sound stream of music at event boundaries is necessary for identification and extraction of musical context and features. To investigate recognition of music termination structure, or cadence, we composed music sequences with two types of dominant-tonic termination structures and presented them to participants and analyzed their segment recognition and brain activities using EEG. The results revealed that a sense of termination was caused by listening to a tonic chord. Frontal area positivity at 380-480 ms was elicited by a dominant chord in cadence type I with a stronger sense of termination. These activities possibly reflected the expectation of the next tonic chord in the cadence.

Neural correlates of abstract rule learning: an event-related potential study.

Abstract rule learning is a fundamental aspect of human cognition, and is essential for language acquisition. However, despite its importance, the neural mechanisms underlying abstract rule learning are still largely unclear. In this study, we investigated the neural correlates of abstract rule learning by recording auditory event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants were first presented with artificial three-syllable sequences containing ABA or ABB abstract rules for learning. They were then tested on sequences of novel syllables following the ABA or ABB abstract rules, half of which were inconsistent with the rule previously learned. Grand-averaged ERPs revealed significant decreases in positivity at 200-260ms in response to consistent sequences during the earlier session of the test phase, and increased negativity at around 400ms in response to inconsistent sequences in the later session. The potentials exhibited a left anterior-dominant distribution. The appearance of the N400-like negativity in the later session suggests that temporal ERP changes occurred with the abstract rule learning process, and that the N400-like negativity is associated with the acquisition of abstract rules.