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Published on: May 9, 2019
Pre-attentive mental processing of music expectation: event-related potentials of a partially violating and resolving
Yu-Cheng Pei1, Chia-Ling Chen, Chia-Ying Chung
1Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, 199 Tun-Hwa North Road, Taipei 105, Taiwan.
Abstract:
Auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) were investigated in an oddball paradigm to verify electrophysiological evidence of music expectation, which is a key component of artistic presentation. The non-target condition consisted of four-chord harmonic chord sequences, while the target condition was manifested by a partially violating third chord and a resolving fourth chord. The results showed that the specific mismatch negativity (MMN) elicited in the resolving chord is as robust as that elicited in the partially violating chord. Moreover, the P3b (P300) elicited in the resolving chord was smaller than the one in the violating chord. Taken together these data indicates that the human brain pre-attentatively may be able to anticipate a subsequent resolving chord when music expectation is generated by a partially violating chord.
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