Music cognition as mental time travel.

As we experience a temporal flux of events our expectations of future events change. Such expectations seem to be central to our perception of affect in music, but we have little understanding of how expectations change as recent information is integrated. When music establishes a pitch centre (tonality), we rapidly learn to anticipate its continuation. What happens when anticipations are challenged by new events? Here we show that providing a melodic challenge to an established tonality leads to progressive changes in the impact of the features of the stimulus on listeners' expectations. The results demonstrate that retrospective analysis of recent events can establish new patterns of expectation that converge towards probabilistic interpretations of the temporal stream. These studies point to wider applications of understanding the impact of information flow on future prediction and its behavioural utility

Extending zygonic theory to analyse patterns of musical influence between children creating pieces of music in groups, in England and Japan

This article reports on initial exploratory trials of a methodological extension of zygonic theory, through which this psychomusicologically-based approach was used to analyse patterns of musical influence within pieces created by groups of primary school children aged 9–11 years in England and Japan. Previously, the theory had been used in educational and therapeutic contexts to gauge the musical impact of each participant on the other in one-to-one musical interactions. The preliminary findings reported here suggest that zygonically-derived analytical techniques may potentially be of value not only in defining children’s musical contributions and patterns of influence as they seek to create pieces in groups, but also in comparative studies that examine the potentially dissimilar improvisatory approaches adopted by different cohorts of pupils. It is further argued that zygonic measures of musical influence may be of value as inverse proxy measures of creativity

Neonatal antithrombin III

Antithrombin III (AT-III) heparin cofactor activity and its antigen levels have been determined in 106 plasma samples from 42 term and preterm neonates. In contrast to healthy adult controls, a reduced activity/antigen (act/ag) ratio (ranging from 0.26 to 0.86) was observed in 90% of the samples and was independent of the state of health of the infant. By modifying the routine assay techniques, laboratory artefacts were excluded as the cause of the observed discrepancy. The relative increase in antigenic AT-III could not be accounted for by circulating AT-III-thrombin complexes, or by increased heparin cofactor II plasma levels in neonate