An influence of menopausal symptoms on mental health, emotion perception, and quality of life: a multi-faceted approach.

PURPOSE: The menopausal transition brings with it many physical, cognitive, and affective changes in a woman's life, impacting quality of life. Whereas prior work has examined impact on general mental health and cognitive function, research on basic affective processing during menopause remains scarce. METHODS: Using a median-split procedure, this pre-registered study examined the impact of stronger (N = 46 women) vs. milder (N = 47 women) menopausal symptoms using a behavioural task of subjective emotion perception (embody) and a passive eye tracking viewing task of emotional faces in addition to self-report questionnaires. After 3 months, participants completed the questionnaires again to examine whether objective measures of emotion perception (eye tracking) might predict mental health at follow-up. RESULTS: As anticipated, women with stronger vs. milder menopausal symptoms reported increased symptoms of anxiety, depression, stress, emotion regulation difficulties, and lower quality of life during both time points. While no evidence was found in the behavioural task, eye tracking data indicated blunted emotion perception in women with high menopausal symptoms, while women with low symptoms spent more time looking at happy faces relative to fearful or surprised faces. Although eye tracking or hormonal data did not predict mental health at follow-up, a higher estradiol/FSH ratio indicated a higher quality of life. CONCLUSIONS: This study documented an impact of the menopausal transition and strength of menopausal symptoms in particular on objective emotion perception as well as mental health and quality of life in women suffering from stronger vs. milder menopausal symptoms. Clinical implications are discussed.

Development and validation of the Emotional Climate Change Stories (ECCS) stimuli set.

Climate change is widely recognised as an urgent issue, and the number of people concerned about it is increasing. While emotions are among the strongest predictors of behaviour change in the face of climate change, researchers have only recently begun to investigate this topic experimentally. This may be due to the lack of standardised, validated stimuli that would make studying such a topic in experimental settings possible. Here, we introduce a novel Emotional Climate Change Stories (ECCS) stimuli set. ECCS consists of 180 realistic short stories about climate change, designed to evoke five distinct emotions-anger, anxiety, compassion, guilt and hope-in addition to neutral stories. The stories were created based on qualitative data collected in two independent studies: one conducted among individuals highly concerned about climate change, and another one conducted in the general population. The stories were rated on the scales of valence, arousal, anger, anxiety, compassion, guilt and hope in the course of three independent studies. First, we explored the underlying structure of ratings (Study 1; n = 601). Then we investigated the replicability (Study 2; n = 307) and cross-cultural validity (Study 3; n = 346) of ECCS. The collected ratings were highly consistent across the studies. Furthermore, we found that the level of climate change concern explained the intensity of elicited emotions. The ECCS dataset is available in Polish, Norwegian and English and can be employed for experimental research on climate communication, environmental attitudes, climate action-taking, or mental health and wellbeing.

Bodily confusion: Lower differentiation of emotional and physiological states in student alcohol users.

BACKGROUND: Alexithymia, difficulty in recognising and naming emotions, is common among people who use alcohol. There is also emerging evidence that people with alexithymia are unable to distinguish emotions from non-emotional physiological states. The project aimed to test if alcohol use is related to the way student drinkers experience emotions and physiological states in the body. METHODS: We employed a novel method to study bodily sensations related to emotions and physiological states in the context of alcohol use: the emBODY tool, which allowed participants to mark areas of the body in which they experience various emotions and physiological states. RESULTS: Students who showed a hazardous pattern of alcohol use (alcohol use disorders identification test [AUDIT] score ≥ 7, N = 91), overall, presented higher alexithymia levels and coloured larger areas for emotions and physiological states (showed less specificity) than those who show low-risk alcohol consumption (AUDIT ≤ 4, N = 90). Moreover, statistical classifiers distinguished feeling-specific maps less accurately for hazardous drinkers than low-risk drinkers [F(1,1998) = 441.16; p < 0.001], confirming that higher alcohol use is related to higher confusion of emotional and non-emotional bodily feelings. CONCLUSIONS: Plausibly, this increased bodily confusion drives alcohol consumption: alcohol may serve as a means of dealing with undifferentiated changes in psychophysiological arousal accompanying emotional states.

Understanding functional brain reorganization for naturalistic piano playing in novice pianists.

Learning to play the piano is a unique complex task, integrating multiple sensory modalities and higher order cognitive functions. Longitudinal neuroimaging studies on adult novice musicians show training-related functional changes in music perception tasks. The reorganization of brain activity while actually playing an instrument was studied only on a very short time frame of a single fMRI session, and longer interventions have not yet been performed. Thus, our aim was to investigate the dynamic complexity of functional brain reorganization while playing the piano within the first half year of musical training. We scanned 24 novice keyboard learners (female, 18-23 years old) using fMRI while they played increasingly complex musical pieces after 1, 6, 13, and 26 weeks of training. Playing music evoked responses bilaterally in the auditory, inferior frontal, and supplementary motor areas, and the left sensorimotor cortex. The effect of training over time, however, invoked widespread changes encompassing the right sensorimotor cortex, cerebellum, superior parietal cortex, anterior insula and hippocampus, among others. As the training progressed, the activation of these regions decreased while playing music. Post hoc analysis revealed region-specific time-courses for independent auditory and motor regions of interest. These results suggest that while the primary sensory, motor, and frontal regions are associated with playing music, the training decreases the involvement of higher order cognitive control and integrative regions, and basal ganglia. Moreover, training might affect distinct brain regions in different ways, providing evidence in favor of the dynamic nature of brain plasticity.

Emotional responses to climate change in Norway and Ireland: a validation of the Inventory of Climate Emotions (ICE) in two European countries and an inspection of its nomological span.

There is an increasing research interest in emotional responses to climate change and their role in climate action and psycho-social impacts of climate change. At the same time, emotional experience of climate change is multidimensional and influenced by a variety of factors, including the local cultural context. Here, we contribute to the scientific debate about this topic with original quality-controlled data from the general populations in Norway (N = 491) and Ireland (N = 485). We investigate the cross-cultural validity and the nomological span of eight distinct emotional responses to climate change - climate anger, climate contempt, climate enthusiasm, climate powerlessness, climate guilt, climate isolation, climate anxiety, and climate sorrow - measured using the recently introduced Inventory of Climate Emotions. We first validate the 8-factor structure of the Norwegian and English language versions of the ICE. Subsequently, we demonstrate a high degree of cross-cultural measurement invariance for these eight climate emotions. Finally, we explore the relationships between these emotional responses and a range of theoretically relevant variables. In this final step, we show that climate emotions are differentially linked to climate change perceptions, support for mitigation policies, socio-demographic factors, feelings of loneliness and alienation, environmental activism, and the willingness to prioritize the natural environment over one's immediate self-interests. Some of these links are also differentiated by the cultural context. This research presents further evidence for the structural, cross-cultural, and concurrent validity of climate emotions as postulated in the ICE framework. Moreover, it provides tools in the form of validated Norwegian and English language versions of the ICE, the complete R code for the validation analysis, as well as an informed basis for cross-cultural research on emotional responses to climate change.

Rats respond to aversive emotional arousal of human handlers with the activation of the basolateral and central amygdala.

Reading danger signals may save an animal's life, and learning about threats from others allows avoiding first-hand aversive and often fatal experiences. Fear expressed by other individuals, including those belonging to other species, may indicate the presence of a threat in the environment and is an important social cue. Humans and other animals respond to conspecifics' fear with increased activity of the amygdala, the brain structure crucial for detecting threats and mounting an appropriate response to them. It is unclear, however, whether the cross-species transmission of threat information involves similar mechanisms, e.g., whether animals respond to the aversively induced emotional arousal of humans with activation of fear-processing circuits in the brain. Here, we report that when rats interact with a human caregiver who had recently undergone fear conditioning, they show risk assessment behavior and enhanced amygdala activation. The amygdala response involves its two major parts, the basolateral and central, which detect a threat and orchestrate defensive responses. Further, we show that humans who learn about a threat by observing another aversively aroused human, similar to rats, activate the basolateral and centromedial parts of the amygdala. Our results demonstrate that rats detect the emotional arousal of recently aversively stimulated caregivers and suggest that cross-species social transmission of threat information may involve similar neural circuits in the amygdala as the within-species transmission.

Interoception and the musical brain: Evidence from cross-sectional and longitudinal behavioral and resting-state fMRI study.

Musical training has been linked to enhanced interoceptive abilities and increased resting-state (RS) functional connectivity (FC) within the interoceptive brain network. We aimed to replicate and extend these findings with a unique cross-sectional and longitudinal study design. Professional musicians and matched individuals with no prior musical experience (training group) were recruited. Participants underwent RS fMRI scans and completed heartbeat counting and discrimination tasks outside of the scanner (time point 1). The training group additionally had RS scans and interoception tests repeated after a 6-month-long keyboard course training (time point 2). We found no evidence for increased interoceptive abilities in professional musicians relative to non-musicians, nor did we observe any improvements in interoception over the course of musical training. RS FC analysis revealed increased FC within the sensorimotor network in professional musicians compared to the training group at the first time point with no change in FC over time in the Training group. These findings challenge the view that musical training may improve interoceptive abilities. Yet, the results suggest that musical training is related to increased communication within the sensorimotor RS network, which consists of some hubs important for interoceptive processing (namely pre- and postcentral gyri and supplementary motor area).

Unlocking the musical brain: A proof-of-concept study on playing the piano in MRI scanner with naturalistic stimuli.

Music is a universal human phenomenon, and can be studied for itself or as a window into the understanding of the brain. Few neuroimaging studies investigate actual playing in the MRI scanner, likely because of the lack of available experimental hardware and analysis tools. Here, we offer an innovative paradigm that addresses this issue in neuromusicology using naturalistic, polyphonic musical stimuli, presents a commercially available MRI-compatible piano, and a flexible approach to quantify participant's performance. We show how making errors while playing can be investigated using an altered auditory feedback paradigm. In the spirit of open science, we make our experimental paradigms and analysis tools available to other researchers studying pianists in MRI. Altogether, we present a proof-of-concept study which shows the feasibility of playing the novel piano in MRI, and a step towards using more naturalistic stimuli.

Overlapping but separate number representations in the intraparietal sulcus-Probing format- and modality-independence in sighted Braille readers.

The Triple-Code Model stipulates that numerical information from different formats and modalities converges on a common magnitude representation in the Intraparietal Sulcus (IPS). To what extent the representations of all numerosity forms overlap remains unsolved. It has been postulated that the representation of symbolic numerosities (for example, Arabic digits) is sparser and grounded in an existing representation that codes for non-symbolic numerosity information (i.e., sets of objects). Other theories argue that numerical symbols represent a separate number category that emerges only during education. Here, we tested a unique group of sighted tactile Braille readers with numerosities 2, 4, 6 and 8 in three number notations: Arabic digits, sets of dots, tactile Braille numbers. Using univariate methods, we showed a consistent overlap in activations evoked by these three number notations. This result shows that all three used notations are represented in the IPS, which may suggest at least a partial overlap between the representations of the three notations used in this experiment. Using MVPA, we found that only non-automatized number information (Braille and sets of dots) allowed successful number classification. However, the numerosity of one notation could not be predicted above chance from the brain activation patterns evoked by another notation (no cross-classification). These results show that the IPS may host independent number codes in overlapping cortical circuits. In addition, they suggest that the level of training in encoding a given type of number information is an important factor that determines the amount of exploitable information and needs to be controlled for in order to identify the neural code underlying numerical information per se.

The Human Centromedial Amygdala Contributes to Negative Prediction Error Signaling during Appetitive and Aversive Pavlovian Gustatory Learning.

Prediction error (PE) is the mismatch between a prior expectation and reality, and it lies at the core of associative learning about aversive and appetitive stimuli. Human studies on fear learning have linked the amygdala to aversive PEs. In contrast, the relationship between the amygdala and PE in appetitive settings and stimuli, unlike those that induce fear, has received less research attention. Animal studies show that the amygdala is a functionally heterogeneous structure. Nevertheless, the role of the amygdala nuclei in PE signaling remains unknown in humans. To clarify the role of two subdivisions of the human amygdala, the centromedial amygdala (CMA) and basolateral amygdala (BLA), in appetitive and aversive PE signaling, we used gustatory pavlovian learning involving eating-related naturalistic outcomes. Thirty-eight right-handed individuals (19 females) participated in the study. We found that surprise with neutral feedback when a reward is expected triggers activity within the left and right CMA. When an aversive outcome is expected, surprise with neutral feedback triggers activity only within the left CMA. Notably, the BLA was not activated by those conditions. Thus, the CMA engages in negative PE signaling during appetitive and aversive gustatory pavlovian learning, whereas the BLA is not critical for this process. In addition, PE-related activity within the left CMA during aversive learning is negatively correlated with neuroticism and positively correlated with extraversion. The findings indicate the importance of the CMA in gustatory learning when the value of outcomes changes and have implications for understanding psychological conditions that manifest perturbed processing of negative PEs.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT A discrepancy between a prediction and an actual outcome (PE) plays a crucial role in learning. Learning improves when an outcome is more significant than expected (positive PE) and worsens when it is smaller than expected (negative PE). We found that the negative PE during appetitive and aversive taste learning is associated with increased activity of the CMA, which suggests that the CMA controls taste learning. Our findings may have implications for understanding psychological states associated with deficient learning from negative PEs, such as obesity and addictive behaviors.

The utility of the emBODY tool as a novel method of studying complex phenomena-related emotions.

Bodily sensations are one of the major building blocks of emotional experience. However, people differ in their ability to recognise and name their emotions, especially those in response to complex phenomena such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, we investigated whether the bodily sensation maps (BSMs) approach can be employed to study emotions related to phenomena that are likely to evoke various, and perhaps even conflicting, emotions in people. Using a unique topographical self-report method-the previously established emBODY tool, 548 participants marked where in the body they feel sensations (activations and deactivations) when they experience distinct emotions (e.g. happiness) and when they think about different phenomena, namely climate change, COVID-19 pandemic, war, nature, friends, and summer holidays. We revealed maps of bodily sensations associated with different emotions and phenomena. Importantly, each phenomenon was related to a statistically unique BSM, suggesting that participants were able to differentiate between feelings associated with distinct phenomena. Yet, we also found that BSMs of phenomena showed some similarity with maps of emotions. Together, these findings indicate that the emBODY tool might be useful in uncovering the range of emotions individuals experience towards complex phenomena.

Learning about threat from friends and strangers is equally effective: An fMRI study on observational fear conditioning.

Humans often benefit from social cues when learning about the world. For instance, learning about threats from others can save the individual from dangerous first-hand experiences. Familiarity is believed to increase the effectiveness of social learning, but it is not clear whether it plays a role in learning about threats. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we undertook a naturalistic approach and investigated whether there was a difference between observational fear learning from friends and strangers. Participants (observers) witnessed either their friends or strangers (demonstrators) receiving aversive (shock) stimuli paired with colored squares (observational learning stage). Subsequently, participants watched the same squares, but without receiving any shocks (direct-expression stage). We observed a similar pattern of brain activity in both groups of observers. Regions related to threat responses (amygdala, anterior insula, anterior cingulate cortex) and social perception (fusiform gyrus, posterior superior temporal sulcus) were activated during the observational phase, possibly reflecting the emotional contagion process. The anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex were also activated during the subsequent stage, indicating the expression of learned threat. Because there were no differences between participants observing friends and strangers, we argue that social threat learning is independent of the level of familiarity with the demonstrator.

Emotion schema effects on associative memory differ across emotion categories at the behavioural, physiological and neural level: Emotion schema effects on associative memory differs for disgust and fear.

Previous behavioural and neuroimaging studies have consistently reported that memory is enhanced for associations congruent or incongruent with the structure of prior knowledge, termed as schemas. However, it remains unclear if similar effects arise with emotion-related associations, and whether they depend on the type of emotions. Here, we addressed this question using a novel face-word pair association paradigm combined with fMRI and eye-tracking techniques. In two independent studies, we demonstrated and replicated that both congruency with emotion schemas and emotion category interact to affect associative memory. Overall, memory retrieval was higher for faces from pairs congruent vs. incongruent with emotion schemas, paralleled by a greater recruitment of left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) during successful encoding. However, emotion schema effects differed across two negative emotion categories. Disgust was remembered better than fear, and only disgust activated left IFG stronger during encoding of congruent vs. incongruent pairs, suggestive of deeper semantic processing for the associations. On the contrary, encoding of congruent fear vs. disgust-related pairs was accompanied with greater activity in right fusiform gyrus (FG), suggesting a stronger sensory processing of faces. In addition, successful memory formation for congruent disgust pairs was associated with a higher pupil dilation index related to sympathetic activation, longer gaze time on words compared to faces, and more gaze switches between paired words and faces. This was reversed for fear-related congruent pairs where the faces attracted longer gaze time (compared to words). Overall, our results provide converging evidence from behavioural, physiological, and neural measures to suggest that congruency with available emotion schemas influence memory associations in a similar manner to semantic schemas. However, these effects vary across distinct emotion categories, pointing to a differential role of semantic processing and visual attention processes in the modulation of memory by disgust and fear, respectively.

Abnormal behavioral and neural responses in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during emotional interference for cognitive control in pedophilic sex offenders.

Studies within the last decade have reported neural and behavioral differences in cognitive control between men with the pedophilic disorder who commit (CSO+) and do not commit (CSO-) child sexual abuse. Prior studies reported a higher number of errors in Go/Nogo task and lower activity of the prefrontal cortex in NoGo trials, in CSO+ compared with CSO-. Moreover, negative mood was reported as a risk factor for child sexual abuse in pedophilic men. We aimed to examine differences in brain function and behavior between CSO+ and CSO- patients regarding emotional interference on cognitive processes and inhibition. We recruited CSO+ (n = 11) and CSO- (n = 14) patients as well as matched healthy controls (HC) (n = 17). Participants performed the affective Go/NoGo task in a block-design functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment. The task comprised the following four conditions: Negative Go, including only Go stimuli and negatively valenced pictures; Negative NoGo, including 50% of Go and 50% of NoGo trials as well as negatively valenced pictures; and two corresponding conditions with neutral pictures. Brain analysis was restricted to the dorsolateral prefrontal (DLPFC), orbitofrontal, and anterior cingulate cortices. The HC and CSO- groups, but not the CSO+ group, showed significantly slower reactions in negative blocks compared with neutral blocks. Brain analysis revealed increased activation in the right DLPFC during emotional interference contrast (Negative > Neutral) in the HC and CSO- groups; however, there was decreased activation in the CSO+ group. In the CSO+ group, negative distractors did not increase cognitive control processes, which was observed in the CSO- and HC groups at the behavioral and neural levels. These results support previous reports indicating offender status is associated with cognitive and emotional impairments.

Brain structural correlates of cognitive-attentional syndrome - a Voxel-Based Morphometry Study.

Cognitive-attentional syndrome (CAS) is in the self-regulatory executive function model a set of cognitive and behavioural strategies aimed at regulating cognition and emotion originating from maladaptive metacognitive beliefs. Investigating the brain structure of people with high levels of CAS enables a better understanding of the syndrome and bridging between the metacognitive model of psychopathology and previous results on structural abnormalities in various psychological disorders. Participants with high (n=40) and low levels of CAS (n=44) underwent structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging session. Voxel-Based Morphometry analytical approach was used to compute grey matter volume (GMV) differences between the groups. The group with a high level of CAS had lower GMV in the dorsal part of the anterior cingulate cortex. Our results are in line with the self-regulatory executive function model of psychopathology, showing a link between CAS and lowered GMV in the brain region associated with the regulation of cognition and emotion. They are also in agreement with meta-analytical results on structural correlates of various psychological disorders.

Distinct medial-tempora lobe mechanisms of encoding and amygdala-mediated memory reinstatement for disgust and fear.

Current models of episodic memory posit that retrieval involves the reenactment of encoding processes. Recent evidence has shown that this reinstatement process - indexed by subsequent encoding-retrieval similarity of brain activity patterns - is related to the activity in the hippocampus during encoding. However, we tend to re-experience emotional events in memory more richly than dull events. The role of amygdala - a critical hub of emotion processing - in reinstatement of emotional events was poorly understood. To investigate it, we leveraged a previously overlooked divergence in the role of amygdala in memory modulation by distinct emotions - disgust and fear. Here we used a novel paradigm in which participants encoded complex events (word pairs) and their memory was tested after 3 weeks, both phases during fMRI scanning. Using representational similarity analysis and univariate analyses, we show that the strength of amygdala activation during encoding was correlated with memory reinstatement of individual event representations in emotion-specific regions. Critically, amygdala modulated reinstatement more for disgust than fear. This was in line with other differences observed at the level of memory performance and neural mechanisms of encoding. Specifically, amygdala and perirhinal cortex were more involved during encoding of disgust-related events, whereas hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus during encoding of fear-related events. Together, these findings shed a new light on the role of the amygdala and medial temporal lobe regions in encoding and reinstatement of specific emotional memories.

Emotion norms for 6000 Polish word meanings with a direct mapping to the Polish wordnet.

Emotion lexicons are useful in research across various disciplines, but the availability of such resources remains limited for most languages. While existing emotion lexicons typically comprise words, it is a particular meaning of a word (rather than the word itself) that conveys emotion. To mitigate this issue, we present the Emotion Meanings dataset, a novel dataset of 6000 Polish word meanings. The word meanings are derived from the Polish wordnet (plWordNet), a large semantic network interlinking words by means of lexical and conceptual relations. The word meanings were manually rated for valence and arousal, along with a variety of basic emotion categories (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, anticipation, happiness, surprise, and trust). The annotations were found to be highly reliable, as demonstrated by the similarity between data collected in two independent samples: unsupervised (n = 21,317) and supervised (n = 561). Although we found the annotations to be relatively stable for female, male, younger, and older participants, we share both summary data and individual data to enable emotion research on different demographically specific subgroups. The word meanings are further accompanied by the relevant metadata, derived from open-source linguistic resources. Direct mapping to Princeton WordNet makes the dataset suitable for research on multiple languages. Altogether, this dataset provides a versatile resource that can be employed for emotion research in psychology, cognitive science, psycholinguistics, computational linguistics, and natural language processing.

Temporal Dynamics of Brain White Matter Plasticity in Sighted Subjects during Tactile Braille Learning: A Longitudinal Diffusion Tensor Imaging Study.

The white matter (WM) architecture of the human brain changes in response to training, though fine-grained temporal characteristics of training-induced white matter plasticity remain unexplored. We investigated white matter microstructural changes using diffusion tensor imaging at five different time points in 26 sighted female adults during 8 months of training on tactile braille reading. Our results show that training-induced white matter plasticity occurs both within and beyond the trained sensory modality, as reflected by fractional anisotropy (FA) increases in somatosensory and visual cortex, respectively. The observed changes followed distinct time courses, with gradual linear FA increase along the training in the somatosensory cortex and sudden visual cortex cross-modal plasticity occurring after braille input became linguistically meaningful. WM changes observed in these areas returned to baseline after the cessation of learning in line with the supply-demand model of plasticity. These results also indicate that the temporal dynamics of microstructural plasticity in different cortical regions might be modulated by the nature of computational demands. We provide additional evidence that observed FA training-induced changes are behaviorally relevant to tactile reading. Together, these results demonstrate that WM plasticity is a highly dynamic process modulated by the introduction of novel experiences.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Throughout the lifetime the human brain is shaped by various experiences. Training-induced reorganization in white matter (WM) microstructure has been reported, but we know little about its temporal dynamics. To fill this gap, we scanned sighted subjects five times during tactile braille reading training. We observed different dynamics of WM plasticity in the somatosensory and visual cortices implicated in braille reading. The former showed a continuous increase in WM tissue anisotropy along with tactile training, while microstructural changes in the latter were observed only after the participants learned to read braille words. Our results confirm the supply-demand model of brain plasticity and provide evidence that WM reorganization depends on distinct computational demands and functional roles of regions involved in the trained skill.

The influence of light exposure and chronotype on working memory in humans.

Here we examine how exposure to blue (peaking at λ=470 nm), green (peaking at λ=505 nm) and red (peaking at λ=630 nm) light affects subsequent working memory performance measured with visual N-back tasks and associated functional brain responses in participants with extreme morning and extreme evening chronotype. We used within-subjects experimental manipulation on carefully selected samples and state of the art equipment for light exposure. The results show no differences between extreme morning-type and evening-type individuals in N-back task performance. We also did not replicate the alerting effect of exposure to blue wavelength light, supposedly enhancing performance on cognitive tasks. However, we found higher brain activity in the morning hours for extreme morning in comparison to extreme evening chronotype in several frontal areas of the precentral gyrus, middle and superior frontal gyri and in the occipital gyrus. This may indicate increased strategic or attentional recruitment of prefrontal areas, implicated in compensating working memory load in the morning type.

How Musical Training Shapes the Adult Brain: Predispositions and Neuroplasticity.

Learning to play a musical instrument is a complex task that integrates multiple sensory modalities and higher-order cognitive functions. Therefore, musical training is considered a useful framework for the research on training-induced neuroplasticity. However, the classical nature-or-nurture question remains, whether the differences observed between musicians and non-musicians are due to predispositions or result from the training itself. Here we present a review of recent publications with strong focus on experimental designs to better understand both brain reorganization and the neuronal markers of predispositions when learning to play a musical instrument. Cross-sectional studies identified structural and functional differences between the brains of musicians and non-musicians, especially in regions related to motor control and auditory processing. A few longitudinal studies showed functional changes related to training while listening to and producing music, in the motor network and its connectivity with the auditory system, in line with the outcomes of cross-sectional studies. Parallel changes within the motor system and between the motor and auditory systems were revealed for structural connectivity. In addition, potential predictors of musical learning success were found including increased brain activation in the auditory and motor systems during listening, the microstructure of the arcuate fasciculus, and the functional connectivity between the auditory and the motor systems. We show that "the musical brain" is a product of both the natural human neurodiversity and the training practice.