Tracking Uncertainty - Neural and Behavioral Correlates of Auditory Uncertainty Using a Naturalistic Music Listening Approach

• Applicant: Dr. Iris Mencke
• Subject Area: Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience ; Musicology
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 510788483

In daily life humans are often exposed to uncertain environments. Such situations bear challenges, because outcomes of decisions being made are difficult to estimate, i.e., they cannot be predicted with high certainty. However, humans are intrinsically curious, possess an inherent drive to explore uncertain environments and deliberately engage with novelty. Cognitive science has long been interested in how the brain responds to uncertainty; but the field still lacks a complete picture of the mechanisms and functions with which human individuals process uncertainty and how they successfully minimize it. One question of particular interest to cognitive scientists concerns how predictive processing—a central mechanism underlying perception—is shaped by highly uncertain environments. Researchers increasingly use music to study predictive processes in the brain, thereby taking advantage of the music’s complex structure. A high degree of uncertainty is particularly characteristic of New Music, a musical style that originated in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century and that often has an atonal structure. Although even today it remains largely been neglected in empirical research, atonal music is an ideal and novel tool for studying the neural and cognitive processes underlying auditory uncertainty. The proposed project scrutinizes the way in which the human brain and behavior respond to auditory uncertainty by adopting a naturalistic music listening paradigm that includes a variety of Western tonal and atonal pieces. On the one hand, it aims to disentangle the effects uncertainty has on the neural processing of music (short-term effects). On the other, it investigates the long-term impact of style-specific musical training by drawing on a unique sample of musicians specialized in atonal music, thus discerning whether and how this particular and unique training enhances the neural processing of auditory uncertainty. The proposed project capitalizes on a unique interdisciplinary conjunction between neuroscience and musicology. Given the importance of novelty and exploration not only for various forms of epistemic behavior, but also for processes in the context of learning, the results of this project promise to have broad implications for the field of cognitive neuroscience and beyond.

• DFG Programme: WBP Fellowship
• International Connection: Canada
• Host: Professor Dr. Robert J. Zatorre, Ph.D.