Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Music, Andrea Halpern, Robert J. Zatorre

Faculty Contributions to Books

Neuroimaging has contributed greatly to our understanding of the sensory, motor, and cognitive systems involved in musical processing. Cortical loops connecting auditory with parietal, premotor, and prefrontal cortices are important for encoding pitch and temporal relationships from which music is built and for generating musical expectancies. These circuits are also important for holding information in working memory and for interfacing perceptual and motor representations. Musical imagery recruits auditory areas together with frontal and supplementary motor regions. Musical emotion emerges from the interaction of these systems with the reward circuit. All of these systems are modifiable functionally and structurally following training.