Nonverbale Synchronie und Musik-Erleben im klassischen Konzert

Die Praxis der Musikrezeption im Rahmen klassischer Konzerte ist von restriktiven Verhaltenskonventionen geprägt. Aktuelle kognitionswissenschaftliche und philosophische Ansätze, welche Musik-Erleben als verkörpert oder als über mehrere Individuen verteilt konzeptualisieren, scheinen daher für die Erklärung des Musik-Erlebens in klassischen Konzerten weniger geeignet. Vor diesem Hintergrund untersuchte die vorliegende explorative Studie das Auftreten koordinierter Körperbewegungen als nonverbale Synchronie im Rahmen eines klassischen Konzertes und den Zusammenhang zwischen den Synchronien innerhalb des Publikums und Aspekten des subjektiven Musik-Erlebens. Im Rahmen eines Forschungskonzerts wurden 22 Teilnehmern verschiedene Kammermusikwerke präsentiert, sowie dabei Selbstauskünfte zu Aspekten des Musik-Erlebens erhoben und Körperbewegungen mit drei stationären Kameras erfasst. Nonverbale Synchronie, als Indikator für koordinierte Körperbewegungen, wurde über die Korrelation von Bewegungsenergie-Zeitreihen ermittelt. Die Bewegungsenergie wurde als Anzahl der sich ändernden Pixel aufeinanderfolgender Frames operationalisiert. Es zeigte sich stark ausgeprägte Synchronie zwischen den Musikern sowie eine Synchronie kleiner bis mittlerer Effektstärke innerhalb des Publikums. Zwischen den Musikern und dem Publikum konnte hingegen keine Synchronie festgestellt werden. In Bezug auf das Verhältnis von Synchronie innerhalb des Publikums und dem subjektiven Musik-Erleben zeigten sich signifikante negative Zusammenhänge zwischen dem Gefühl der Verbundenheit mit den Musikern, dem Grad der Absorption und der Synchronisierung innerhalb des Publikums. Dies lässt sich dahingehend interpretieren, dass bei einem stärkeren Fokus der Aufmerksamkeit und des Erlebens auf das Bühnengeschehen die Synchronisierung mit den anderen Mitgliedern des Publikums abnimmt. Die Ergebnisse dieser Studie stehen im Einklang mit Theorien zum verkörperten Musik-Erleben, sie stützen jedoch Ansätze nicht, die darunter die Nachahmung der klangproduzierenden Bewegungen der Musiker verstehen. Ebenso stehen die Befunde nicht in Einklang mit Ansätzen zum verteilten Musik-Erleben. Abschließend werden die Ergebnisse hinsichtlich ihrer musikpraktischen Relevanz bezüglich einer Diversifizierung klassischer Konzerte diskutiert

Specificity of emotion sequences in borderline personality disorder compared to posttraumatic stress disorder, bulimia nervosa, and healthy controls: an e-diary study

Background: Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) exhibit dysregulated emotion sequences in daily life compared to healthy controls (HC). Empirical evidence regarding the specificity of these findings is currently lacking. Methods: To replicate dysregulated emotion sequences in patients with BPD and to investigate the specificity of the sequences, we used e-diaries of 43 female patients with BPD, 28 patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 20 patients with bulimia nervosa (BN), and 28 HC. To capture the rapid dynamics of emotions, we prompted participants every 15 min over a 24-h period to assess their current perceived emotions. We analyzed group differences in terms of activation, persistence, switches, and down-regulation of emotion sequences. Results: By comparing patients with BPD to HC, we replicated five of the seven previously reported dysregulated emotion sequences, as well as 111 out of 113 unaltered sequences. However, none of the previously reported dysregulated emotion sequences exhibited specificity, i.e., none revealed higher frequencies compared to the PTSD group or the BN group. Beyond these findings, we revealed a specific finding for patients with BN, as they most frequently switched from anger to disgust. Conclusions: Replicating previously found dysregulated and unaltered emotional sequences strengthens the significance of emotion sequences. However, the lack of specificity points to emotion sequences as transdiagnostic features

Temporal perception deficits in schizophrenia: integration is the problem, not deployment of attentions

Patients with schizophrenia are known to have impairments in sensory processing. In order to understand the specific temporal perception deficits of schizophrenia, we investigated and determined to what extent impairments in temporal integration can be dissociated from attention deployment using Attentional Blink (AB). Our findings showed that there was no evident deficit in the deployment of attention in patients with schizophrenia. However, patients showed an increased temporal integration deficit within a hundred-millisecond timescale. The degree of such integration dysfunction was correlated with the clinical manifestations of schizophrenia. There was no difference between individuals with/without schizotypal personality disorder in temporal integration. Differently from previous studies using the AB, we did not find a significant impairment in deployment of attention in schizophrenia. Instead, we used both theoretical and empirical approaches to show that previous findings (using the suppression ratio to correct for the baseline difference) produced a systematic exaggeration of the attention deficits. Instead, we modulated the perceptual difficulty of the task to bring the baseline levels of target detection between the groups into closer alignment. We found that the integration dysfunction rather than deployment of attention is clinically relevant, and thus should be an additional focus of research in schizophrenia

Reinforcement learning or active inference?

This paper questions the need for reinforcement learning or control theory when optimising behaviour. We show that it is fairly simple to teach an agent complicated and adaptive behaviours using a free-energy formulation of perception. In this formulation, agents adjust their internal states and sampling of the environment to minimize their free-energy. Such agents learn causal structure in the environment and sample it in an adaptive and self-supervised fashion. This results in behavioural policies that reproduce those optimised by reinforcement learning and dynamic programming. Critically, we do not need to invoke the notion of reward, value or utility. We illustrate these points by solving a benchmark problem in dynamic programming; namely the mountain-car problem, using active perception or inference under the free-energy principle. The ensuing proof-of-concept may be important because the free-energy formulation furnishes a unified account of both action and perception and may speak to a reappraisal of the role of dopamine in the brain

Understanding value creation and word-of-mouth behaviour at cultural events

Cultural value is a highly contested concept, despite its undoubted importance to practitioners and policy makers. Reseach into cultural value has, meanwhile, tended to employ a unidimensional value framework. This has hamprered the understanding of behaviour related to the word-of-mouth (WOM) communication behaviour of cultural values. This paper presents a cultural value segmentation based on a multidimensional value framework, allowing a profile of WOM behaviour (both online and offline) of each segment to be developed. The segmentation has four distinct segments of cultural consumer, each with different combinations of cultural values and WOM communication preferences. In this way, the study challenges current understandings of value creation and transfer in cultural settings. By way of practical recommendations, the study favours the use of market segmentation based on multi-dimensional value ‘constellations’, which can not only achieve better audience development but also to encourage wider WOM communication of the values in question

A graphical vector autoregressive modelling approach to the analysis of electronic diary data

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>In recent years, electronic diaries are increasingly used in medical research and practice to investigate patients' processes and fluctuations in symptoms over time. To model dynamic dependence structures and feedback mechanisms between symptom-relevant variables, a multivariate time series method has to be applied.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We propose to analyse the temporal interrelationships among the variables by a structural modelling approach based on graphical vector autoregressive (VAR) models. We give a comprehensive description of the underlying concepts and explain how the dependence structure can be recovered from electronic diary data by a search over suitable constrained (graphical) VAR models.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The graphical VAR approach is applied to the electronic diary data of 35 obese patients with and without binge eating disorder (BED). The dynamic relationships for the two subgroups between eating behaviour, depression, anxiety and eating control are visualized in two path diagrams. Results show that the two subgroups of obese patients with and without BED are distinguishable by the temporal patterns which influence their respective eating behaviours.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The use of the graphical VAR approach for the analysis of electronic diary data leads to a deeper insight into patient's dynamics and dependence structures. An increasing use of this modelling approach could lead to a better understanding of complex psychological and physiological mechanisms in different areas of medical care and research.</p

Stable Modality-Specific Activity Flows As Reflected by the Neuroenergetic Approach to the fMRI Weighted Maps

This article uses the ideas of neuroenergetic and neural field theories to detect stimulation-driven energy flows in the brain during face and auditory word processing. In this analysis, energy flows are thought to create the stable gradients of the fMRI weighted summary images. The sources, from which activity spreads in the brain during face processing, were detected in the occipital cortex. The following direction of energy flows in the frontal cortex was described: the right inferior frontal = >the left inferior frontal = >the triangular part of the left inferior frontal cortex = >the left operculum. In the left operculum, a localized circuit was described. For auditory word processing, the sources of activity flows were detected bilaterally in the middle superior temporal regions, they were also detected in the left posterior superior temporal cortex. Thus, neuroenergetic assumptions may give a novel perspective for the analysis of neuroimaging data

Analysis of visitors’ mobility patterns through random walk in the Louvre Museum

This paper proposes a random walk model to analyze visitors' mobility patterns in a large museum. Visitors' available time makes their visiting styles different, resulting in dissimilarity in the order and number of visited places and in path sequence length. We analyze all this by comparing a simulation model and observed data, which provide us the strength of the visitors' mobility patterns. The obtained results indicate that shorter stay-type visitors exhibit stronger patterns than those with the longer stay-type, confirming that the former are more selective than the latter in terms of their visitation type.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, 4 table