EEG Correlates of Song Prosody: A New Look at the Relationship between Linguistic and Musical Rhythm

Song composers incorporate linguistic prosody into their music when setting words to melody, a process called “textsetting.” Composers tend to align the expected stress of the lyrics with strong metrical positions in the music. The present study was designed to explore the idea that temporal alignment helps listeners to better understand song lyrics by directing listeners’ attention to instances where strong syllables occur on strong beats. Three types of textsettings were created by aligning metronome clicks with all, some or none of the strong syllables in sung sentences. Electroencephalographic recordings were taken while participants listened to the sung sentences (primes) and performed a lexical decision task on subsequent words and pseudowords (targets, presented visually). Comparison of misaligned and well-aligned sentences showed that temporal alignment between strong/weak syllables and strong/weak musical beats were associated with modulations of induced beta and evoked gamma power, which have been shown to fluctuate with rhythmic expectancies. Furthermore, targets that followed well-aligned primes elicited greater induced alpha and beta activity, and better lexical decision task performance, compared with targets that followed misaligned and varied sentences. Overall, these findings suggest that alignment of linguistic stress and musical meter in song enhances musical beat tracking and comprehension of lyrics by synchronizing neural activity with strong syllables. This approach may begin to explain the mechanisms underlying the relationship between linguistic and musical rhythm in songs, and how rhythmic attending facilitates learning and recall of song lyrics. Moreover, the observations reported here coincide with a growing number of studies reporting interactions between the linguistic and musical dimensions of song, which likely stem from shared neural resources for processing music and speech

Neural Responses to Complex Auditory Rhythms: The Role of Attending

The aim of this study was to explore the role of attention in pulse and meter perception using complex rhythms. We used a selective attention paradigm in which participants attended to either a complex auditory rhythm or a visually presented word list. Performance on a reproduction task was used to gauge whether participants were attending to the appropriate stimulus. We hypothesized that attention to complex rhythms – which contain no energy at the pulse frequency – would lead to activations in motor areas involved in pulse perception. Moreover, because multiple repetitions of a complex rhythm are needed to perceive a pulse, activations in pulse-related areas would be seen only after sufficient time had elapsed for pulse perception to develop. Selective attention was also expected to modulate activity in sensory areas specific to the modality. We found that selective attention to rhythms led to increased BOLD responses in basal ganglia, and basal ganglia activity was observed only after the rhythms had cycled enough times for a stable pulse percept to develop. These observations suggest that attention is needed to recruit motor activations associated with the perception of pulse in complex rhythms. Moreover, attention to the auditory stimulus enhanced activity in an attentional sensory network including primary auditory cortex, insula, anterior cingulate, and prefrontal cortex, and suppressed activity in sensory areas associated with attending to the visual stimulus

Detection and localization of early- and late-stage cancers using platelet RNA

Cancer patients benefit from early tumor detection since treatment outcomes are more favorable for less advanced cancers. Platelets are involved in cancer progression and are considered a promising biosource for cancer detection, as they alter their RNA content upon local and systemic cues. We show that tumor-educated platelet (TEP) RNA-based blood tests enable the detection of 18 cancer types. With 99% specificity in asymptomatic controls, thromboSeq correctly detected the presence of cancer in two-thirds of 1,096 blood samples from stage I–IV cancer patients and in half of 352 stage I–III tumors. Symptomatic controls, including inflammatory and cardiovascular diseases, and benign tumors had increased false-positive test results with an average specificity of 78%. Moreover, thromboSeq determined the tumor site of origin in five different tumor types correctly in over 80% of the cancer patients. These results highlight the potential properties of TEP-derived RNA panels to supplement current approaches for blood-based cancer screening

Increasing frailty is associated with higher prevalence and reduced recognition of delirium in older hospitalised inpatients: results of a multi-centre study

Purpose: Delirium is a neuropsychiatric disorder delineated by an acute change in cognition, attention, and consciousness. It is common, particularly in older adults, but poorly recognised. Frailty is the accumulation of deficits conferring an increased risk of adverse outcomes. We set out to determine how severity of frailty, as measured using the CFS, affected delirium rates, and recognition in hospitalised older people in the United Kingdom. Methods: Adults over 65 years were included in an observational multi-centre audit across UK hospitals, two prospective rounds, and one retrospective note review. Clinical Frailty Scale (CFS), delirium status, and 30-day outcomes were recorded. Results: The overall prevalence of delirium was 16.3% (483). Patients with delirium were more frail than patients without delirium (median CFS 6 vs 4). The risk of delirium was greater with increasing frailty [OR 2.9 (1.8–4.6) in CFS 4 vs 1–3; OR 12.4 (6.2–24.5) in CFS 8 vs 1–3]. Higher CFS was associated with reduced recognition of delirium (OR of 0.7 (0.3–1.9) in CFS 4 compared to 0.2 (0.1–0.7) in CFS 8). These risks were both independent of age and dementia. Conclusion: We have demonstrated an incremental increase in risk of delirium with increasing frailty. This has important clinical implications, suggesting that frailty may provide a more nuanced measure of vulnerability to delirium and poor outcomes. However, the most frail patients are least likely to have their delirium diagnosed and there is a significant lack of research into the underlying pathophysiology of both of these common geriatric syndromes

Scaling the Dynamic Approach to Path Planning and Control: Competition among Behavioral Constraints

The dynamic systems approach to robot planning and control defines a "dynamics" of robot behavior in which task constraints contribute independently to a nonlinear vector field that governs robot actions. We address problems that arise in scaling this approach to handle complex behavioral requirements. We propose a dynamics that operates in the space of task constraints, determining the relative contribution of each constraint to the behavioral dynamics. We find that competition among task constraints is able to deal with problems that arise when combining constraint contributions. Competitive dynamics makes it is possible to specify behavioral requirements (i.e. tasks) that are more complex than simple navigation. To demonstrate the utility of this approach, we design a system of two agents to perform a cooperative navigation task. We show how competition among constraints enables agents to execute sequences of behaviors that satisfy task requirements. In addition, we demonstrate the ..

Resonance and the Perception of Musical Meter

Many connectionist approaches to musical expectancy and music composition let the question of "What next?" overshadow the equally important question of "When next?". One cannot escape the latter question, one of temporal structure, when considering the perception of musical meter. We view the perception of metrical structure as a dynamic process where the temporal organization of external musical events synchronizes, or entrains, a listener's internal processing mechanisms. This article introduces a novel connectionist unit, based upon a mathematical model of entrainment, capable of phase- and frequency-locking to periodic components of incoming rhythmic patterns. Networks of these units can self-organize temporally structured responses to rhythmic patterns. The resulting network behavior embodies the perception of metrical structure. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of our approach for theories of metrical structure and musical expectancy