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The Neural Mechanisms Of Musical Rhythm Processing: Cross-Cultural Differences And The Stages Of Beat Perception, Daniel J. Cameron

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Music is a universal human behaviour, is fundamentally temporal, and has unique temporal properties. This thesis presents research on the cognitive neuroscience of the temporal aspects of music: rhythm, beat, and metre. Specifically, this work investigates how cultural experience influences behavioural and neural measures of rhythm processing, and the different neural mechanisms (with particular interest in the role of the striatum) that underlie different stages of beat perception, as musical rhythms unfold.

Chapter 1 presents an overview of the existing literature on the perceptual, cognitive, and neural processing of rhythm, including the entrainment of neural oscillations to rhythm and the …

Perceiving Oldness In Parietal Cortex: Fmri Characterization Of A Parietal Memory Network, Adrian Gilmore

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The manner in which the human brain recognizes certain stimuli as novel or familiar is a matter of ongoing investigation. The overarching goal of this dissertation is to improve our understanding of how this may be accomplished. More specifically, work contained herein focuses on a recently described "parietal memory network" (PMN; Gilmore et al., 2015) that shows opposite patterns of activity when perceiving novel or familiar stimuli: deactivating in response to novelty, and activating in response to familiarity. Critically, our understanding of this network is based on explicit memory tasks, in which subjects are deliberately instructed to learn or remember …

The Effects Of Concurrent Cognitive Load On The Processing Of Clear And Degraded Speech, Harrison Ritz

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

A previous study has found that perceiving degraded speech requires attention, with compromised behavioral and neurological measures of speech processing for degraded speech, but not clear speech, when participants are distracted (Wild et al., 2012b). We extended these findings by examining behavioral and neural correlates of speech perception under different levels of cognitive load using multiple object tracking. We also investigated the role of attention in perceiving degraded speech that was as intelligible as clear speech, in order to separate perceptual outcomes (i.e., intelligibility) from the requisite processing demands. We found that the speech perception system is heterogeneous in its …

The Neural And Cognitive Basis Of Cumulative Lifetime Familiarity Assessment, Devin Duke

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Perirhinal cortex (PrC) has been implicated as a brain region in the medial temporal lobes (MTL) that critically contributes to familiarity-based recognition memory, a process that allows for recognition to occur independently of contextual recollection. Informed by neurophysiological research in non-human primates, fMRI, as well as behavioural work in humans, the current thesis research tests the novel hypothesis that PrC cortex functioning also underlies the ability to assess cumulative lifetime familiarity with object concepts that are characterized by a lifetime of experiences. In Chapter 2, a patient (NB) with a left anterior temporal lobe (ATL) lesion that included PrC as …

Does The Pain Of Rejection Promote The Pleasure Of Revenge? A Neural Investigation Of Cingulo-Striatal Contributions To Violence, David Chester

Theses and Dissertations--Psychology

Aggression is a dynamic and costly feature of human behavior. One reliable cause of aggression is social rejection, though the underlying mechanisms of this effect remain to be fully understood. Previous research has identified two psychological processes that are independently linked to aggressive retaliation: pain and pleasure. Given recent findings that pain magnifies the experience of pleasure, I predicted that the pain of rejection would promote the pleasure of aggression and thus, aggression itself. I also expected that this indirect effect of aggressive pleasure would only be observed among individuals with weaker self-regulatory abilities that are necessary to cope with …