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A Tablet-Based Assessment of Rhythmic Ability.
The exponential rise in use of mobile consumer electronics has presented a great potential for research to be conducted remotely, with participants numbering several orders of magnitude greater than a typical research paradigm. Here, we attempt to demonstrate the validity and reliability of using a consumer game-engine to create software presented on a mobile tablet to assess sensorimotor synchronization, a proxy of rhythmic ability. Our goal was to ascertain whether previously observed research results can be replicated, rather than assess whether a mobile tablet achieves comparable performance to a desktop computer. To achieve this, younger (aged 18-35 years) and older (aged 60-80 years) adult musicians and non-musicians were recruited to play a custom-designed sensorimotor synchronization assessment on a mobile tablet in a controlled laboratory environment. To assess reliability, participants performed the assessment twice, separated by a week, and an intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) was calculated. Results supported the validity of this approach to assessing rhythmic abilities by replicating previously observed results. Specifically, musicians performed better than non-musicians, and younger adults performed better than older adults. Participants also performed best when the tempo was in the range of previously-identified preferred tempos, when the stimuli included both audio and visual information, and when synchronizing on-beat compared to off-beat or continuation (self-paced) synchronization. Additionally, high ICC values (>0.75) suggested excellent test-retest reliability. Together, these results support the notion that consumer electronics running software built with a game engine may serve as a valuable resource for remote, mobile-based data collection of rhythmic abilities
Multimodal music information processing and retrieval: survey and future challenges
Towards improving the performance in various music information processing
tasks, recent studies exploit different modalities able to capture diverse
aspects of music. Such modalities include audio recordings, symbolic music
scores, mid-level representations, motion, and gestural data, video recordings,
editorial or cultural tags, lyrics and album cover arts. This paper critically
reviews the various approaches adopted in Music Information Processing and
Retrieval and highlights how multimodal algorithms can help Music Computing
applications. First, we categorize the related literature based on the
application they address. Subsequently, we analyze existing information fusion
approaches, and we conclude with the set of challenges that Music Information
Retrieval and Sound and Music Computing research communities should focus in
the next years
Emotional Brain-Computer Interfaces
Research in Brain-computer interface (BCI) has significantly increased during the last few years. In addition to their initial role as assisting devices for the physically challenged, BCIs are now proposed for a wider range of applications. As in any HCI application, BCIs can also benefit from adapting their operation to the emotional state of the user. BCIs have the advantage of having access to brain activity which can provide signicant insight into the user's emotional state. This information can be utilized in two manners. 1) Knowledge of the inuence of the emotional state on brain activity patterns can allow the BCI to adapt its recognition algorithms, so that the intention of the user is still correctly interpreted in spite of signal deviations induced by the subject's emotional state. 2) The ability to recognize emotions can be used in BCIs to provide the user with more natural ways of controlling the BCI through affective modulation. Thus, controlling a BCI by recollecting a pleasant memory can be possible and can potentially lead to higher information transfer rates.\ud
These two approaches of emotion utilization in BCI are elaborated in detail in this paper in the framework of noninvasive EEG based BCIs
Noninvasive brain stimulation techniques can modulate cognitive processing
Recent methods that allow a noninvasive modulation of brain activity are able to modulate human cognitive behavior. Among these methods are transcranial electric stimulation and transcranial magnetic stimulation that both come in multiple variants. A property of both types of brain stimulation is that they modulate brain activity and in turn modulate cognitive behavior. Here, we describe the methods with their assumed neural mechanisms for readers from the economic and social sciences and little prior knowledge of these techniques. Our emphasis is on available protocols and experimental parameters to choose from when designing a study. We also review a selection of recent studies that have successfully applied them in the respective field. We provide short pointers to limitations that need to be considered and refer to the relevant papers where appropriate
Timescales of Massive Human Entrainment
The past two decades have seen an upsurge of interest in the collective
behaviors of complex systems composed of many agents entrained to each other
and to external events. In this paper, we extend concepts of entrainment to the
dynamics of human collective attention. We conducted a detailed investigation
of the unfolding of human entrainment - as expressed by the content and
patterns of hundreds of thousands of messages on Twitter - during the 2012 US
presidential debates. By time locking these data sources, we quantify the
impact of the unfolding debate on human attention. We show that collective
social behavior covaries second-by-second to the interactional dynamics of the
debates: A candidate speaking induces rapid increases in mentions of his name
on social media and decreases in mentions of the other candidate. Moreover,
interruptions by an interlocutor increase the attention received. We also
highlight a distinct time scale for the impact of salient moments in the
debate: Mentions in social media start within 5-10 seconds after the moment;
peak at approximately one minute; and slowly decay in a consistent fashion
across well-known events during the debates. Finally, we show that public
attention after an initial burst slowly decays through the course of the
debates. Thus we demonstrate that large-scale human entrainment may hold across
a number of distinct scales, in an exquisitely time-locked fashion. The methods
and results pave the way for careful study of the dynamics and mechanisms of
large-scale human entrainment.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables, 4 supplementary figures. 2nd version
revised according to peer reviewers' comments: more detailed explanation of
the methods, and grounding of the hypothese
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