Effect of musical expertise on the perception of duration and pitch in language: A cross-linguistic study.

This study adopts a cross-linguistic perspective and investigates how musical expertise affects the perception of duration and pitch in language. Native speakers of Chinese (N = 44) and Estonian (N = 46), each group subdivided into musicians and non-musicians, participated in a mismatch negativity (MMN) experiment where they passively listened to both Chinese and Estonian stimuli, followed by a behavioral experiment where they attentively discriminated the stimuli in the non-native language (i.e., Chinese to Estonian participants and Estonian to Chinese participants). In both experiments, stimuli of duration change, pitch change, and duration plus pitch change were discriminated. We found higher behavioral sensitivity among Chinese musicians than non-musicians in perceiving the duration change in Estonian and higher behavioral sensitivity among Estonian musicians than non-musicians in perceiving all types of changes in Chinese, but no corresponding effect was found in the MMN results, which suggests a more salient effect of musical expertise on foreign language processing when attention is required. Secondly, Chinese musicians did not outperform non-musicians in attentively discriminating the pitch-related stimuli in Estonian, suggesting that musical expertise can be overridden by tonal language experience when perceiving foreign linguistic pitch, especially when an attentive discrimination task is administered. Thirdly, we found larger MMN among Chinese and Estonian musicians than their non-musician counterparts in perceiving the largest deviant (i.e., duration plus pitch) in their native language. Taken together, our results demonstrate a positive effect of musical expertise on language processing.

Correction to: 'Raising the value of research studies in psychological science by increasing the credibility of research reports: The Transparent Psi Project' (2023) by Kekecs et al.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1098/rsos.191375.][This corrects the article DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2022.2500.].

Processing emotions from faces and words measured by event-related brain potentials.

Affective aspects of a stimulus can be processed rapidly and before cognitive attribution, acting much earlier for verbal stimuli than previously considered. Aimed for specific mechanisms, event-related brain potentials (ERPs), expressed in facial expressions or word meaning and evoked by six basic emotions - anger, disgust, fear, happy, sad, and surprise - relative to emotionally neutral stimuli were analysed in a sample of 116 participants. Brain responses in the occipital and left temporal regions elicited by the sadness in facial expressions or words were indistinguishable from responses evoked by neutral faces or words. Confirming previous findings, facial fear elicited an early and strong posterior negativity. Instead of expected parietal positivity, both the happy faces and words produced significantly more negative responses compared to neutral. Surprise in facial expressions and words elicited a strong early response in the left temporal cortex, which could be a signature of appraisal. The results of this study are consistent with the view that both types of affective stimuli, facial emotions and word meaning, set off rapid processing and responses occur very early in the processing stage.

Raising the value of research studies in psychological science by increasing the credibility of research reports: the transparent Psi project.

The low reproducibility rate in social sciences has produced hesitation among researchers in accepting published findings at their face value. Despite the advent of initiatives to increase transparency in research reporting, the field is still lacking tools to verify the credibility of research reports. In the present paper, we describe methodologies that let researchers craft highly credible research and allow their peers to verify this credibility. We demonstrate the application of these methods in a multi-laboratory replication of Bem's Experiment 1 (Bem 2011 J. Pers. Soc. Psychol. 100, 407-425. (doi:10.1037/a0021524)) on extrasensory perception (ESP), which was co-designed by a consensus panel including both proponents and opponents of Bem's original hypothesis. In the study we applied direct data deposition in combination with born-open data and real-time research reports to extend transparency to protocol delivery and data collection. We also used piloting, checklists, laboratory logs and video-documented trial sessions to ascertain as-intended protocol delivery, and external research auditors to monitor research integrity. We found 49.89% successful guesses, while Bem reported 53.07% success rate, with the chance level being 50%. Thus, Bem's findings were not replicated in our study. In the paper, we discuss the implementation, feasibility and perceived usefulness of the credibility-enhancing methodologies used throughout the project.

Subjectively different emotional schematic faces not automatically discriminated from the brain's bioelectrical responses.

The present study investigates how the brain automatically discriminates emotional schematic faces, as indicated by the mismatch responses, and how reliable these brain responses are. Thirty-three healthy volunteers participated in the vMMN EEG experiment with four experimental sets differing from each other by the type of standard (object with scrambled face features) and the type of deviants (Angry, Happy and Neutral schematic faces) presented. Conscious subjective evaluations of valence, arousal and attention catching of the same stimuli showed clear differentiation of emotional expressions. Deviant faces elicited rather similar vMMN at frontal and occipital sites. Bayesian analyses suggest that vMMN does not differ between angry and happy faces. Neutral faces, however, did not yield statistically significant vMMN at occipital leads. Pearson's correlation and intra-class correlation analyses showed that the brain's reactions to the stimuli were highly stable within individuals across the experimental sets, whereas the mismatch responses were much more variable.

Perceptual Asymmetries and Auditory Processing of Estonian Quantities.

Similar to visual perception, auditory perception also has a clearly described "pop-out" effect, where an element with some extra feature is easier to detect among elements without an extra feature. This phenomenon is better known as auditory perceptual asymmetry. We investigated such asymmetry between shorter or longer duration, and level or falling of pitch of linguistic stimuli that carry a meaning in one language (Estonian), but not in another (Russian). For the mismatch negativity (MMN) experiment, we created four different types of stimuli by modifying the duration of the first vowel [ɑ] (170, 290 ms) and pitch contour (level vs. falling pitch) of the stimuli words ('SATA,' 'SAKI'). The stimuli were synthesized from Estonian words ('SATA,' 'SAKI') and follow the Estonian language three-way quantity system, which incorporates tonal features (falling pitch contour) together with temporal patterns. This made the meaning of the word dependent on the combination of both features and allows us to compare the relative contribution of duration and pitch contour in discrimination of language stimuli in the brain via MMN generation. The participants of the experiment were 12 Russian native speakers with little or no experience in Estonian and living in Estonia short-term, and 12 Estonian native speakers (age 18-27 years). We found that participants' perception of the linguistic stimuli differed not only according to the physical features but also according to their native language, confirming that the meaning of the word interferes with the early automatic processing of phonological features. The GAMM and ANOVA analysis of the reversed design results showed that the deviant with longer duration among shorter standards elicited a MMN response with greater amplitude than the short deviant among long standards, while changes in pitch contour (falling vs. level pitch) produced neither strong MMN nor asymmetry. Thus, we demonstrate the effect of language background on asymmetric perception of linguistic stimuli that aligns with those of previous studies (Jaramillo et al., 2000), and contributes to the growing body of knowledge supporting auditory perceptual asymmetry.

Psycho-social factors associated with mental resilience in the Corona lockdown.

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is not only a threat to physical health but is also having severe impacts on mental health. Although increases in stress-related symptomatology and other adverse psycho-social outcomes, as well as their most important risk factors have been described, hardly anything is known about potential protective factors. Resilience refers to the maintenance of mental health despite adversity. To gain mechanistic insights about the relationship between described psycho-social resilience factors and resilience specifically in the current crisis, we assessed resilience factors, exposure to Corona crisis-specific and general stressors, as well as internalizing symptoms in a cross-sectional online survey conducted in 24 languages during the most intense phase of the lockdown in Europe (22 March to 19 April) in a convenience sample of N = 15,970 adults. Resilience, as an outcome, was conceptualized as good mental health despite stressor exposure and measured as the inverse residual between actual and predicted symptom total score. Preregistered hypotheses (osf.io/r6btn) were tested with multiple regression models and mediation analyses. Results confirmed our primary hypothesis that positive appraisal style (PAS) is positively associated with resilience (p < 0.0001). The resilience factor PAS also partly mediated the positive association between perceived social support and resilience, and its association with resilience was in turn partly mediated by the ability to easily recover from stress (both p < 0.0001). In comparison with other resilience factors, good stress response recovery and positive appraisal specifically of the consequences of the Corona crisis were the strongest factors. Preregistered exploratory subgroup analyses (osf.io/thka9) showed that all tested resilience factors generalize across major socio-demographic categories. This research identifies modifiable protective factors that can be targeted by public mental health efforts in this and in future pandemics.

Interpreting Estonian Demonstratives: The Effects of Referent's Distance and Visual Salience.

Most of the research done with spatial demonstratives (words such as this, here and that, there) have focused on the production, not the interpretation, of these words. In addition, emphasis has been largely on demonstrative pronouns, leaving demonstrative adverbs with relatively little research attention. The present study explores the interpretation of both demonstrative pronouns and demonstrative adverbs in Estonian-a Finno-Ugric language with two dialectal-specific demonstrative pronoun systems. In the South-Estonian (SE) dialectal region, two demonstrative pronouns, see-"this" and too-"that", are used. In the North-Estonian (NE) region, only one, see-"this/that", is used. The aim of this study is twofold. First, we test if the distance and the visual salience of a referent have an effect on the interpretation of demonstratives. Second, we explore if there is a difference in the interpretation of demonstratives between native speakers from SE and NE. We used an interpretation experiment with 30 participants per group (total n = 60) and compared the SE and NE group responses. The results clearly show that the distance of the referent has an effect on how demonstratives are interpreted across the two groups, while the effect of visual salience is inconclusive. There is also a difference in the interpretation of demonstratives between the two dialectal groups. When using the Estonian with an influence of the SE dialect, the NE speakers rely on demonstrative adverbs in interpreting the referential utterance that includes demonstrative pronoun and adverb combinations, whereas the SE speakers also take into account the semantics of demonstrative pronouns. We show that, in addition to an already known difference in the production, there is also a difference in the interpretation of demonstratives between the two groups. In addition, our findings support the recognition that languages that have distance neutral demonstrative pronouns enforce the spatial meaning of a referring utterance by adding demonstrative adverbs. Not only is the interpretation of demonstrative pronouns affected, but the interpretation of demonstrative adverbs as well. The latter shows the importance of studying adverbs also, not just pronouns, and contributes to further knowledge of how demonstratives function.

Automatic auditory and somatosensory brain responses in relation to cognitive abilities and physical fitness in older adults.

In normal ageing, structural and functional changes in the brain lead to an altered processing of sensory stimuli and to changes in cognitive functions. The link between changes in sensory processing and cognition is not well understood, but physical fitness is suggested to be beneficial for both. We recorded event-related potentials to somatosensory and auditory stimuli in a passive change detection paradigm from 81 older and 38 young women and investigated their associations with cognitive performance. In older adults also associations to physical fitness were studied. The somatosensory mismatch response was attenuated in older adults and it associated with executive functions. Somatosensory P3a did not show group differences, but in older adults, it associated with physical fitness. Auditory N1 and P2 responses to repetitive stimuli were larger in amplitude in older than in young adults. There were no group differences in the auditory mismatch negativity, but it associated with working memory capacity in young but not in older adults. Our results indicate that in ageing, changes in stimulus encoding and deviance detection are observable in electrophysiological responses to task-irrelevant somatosensory and auditory stimuli, and the higher somatosensory response amplitudes are associated with better executive functions and physical fitness.

Visual mismatch negativity (vMMN): A review and meta-analysis of studies in psychiatric and neurological disorders.

The visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) response is an event-related potential (ERP) component, which is automatically elicited by events that violate predictions based on prior events. VMMN experiments use visual stimulus repetition to induce predictions, and vMMN is obtained by subtracting the response to rare unpredicted stimuli from those to frequent stimuli. One increasingly popular interpretation of the mismatch response postulates that vMMN, similar to its auditory counterpart (aMMN), represents a prediction error response generated by cortical mechanisms forming probabilistic representations of sensory signals. Here we discuss the physiological and theoretical basis of vMMN and review thirty-three studies from the emerging field of its clinical applications, presenting a meta-analysis of findings in schizophrenia, mood disorders, substance abuse, neurodegenerative disorders, developmental disorders, deafness, panic disorder and hypertension. Furthermore, we include reports on aging and maturation as they bear upon many clinically relevant conditions. Surveying the literature we found that vMMN is altered in several clinical populations which is in line with aMMN findings. An important potential advantage of vMMN however is that it allows the investigation of deficits in predictive processing in cognitive domains which rely primarily on visual information; a principal sensory modality and thus of vital importance in environmental information processing and response, and a modality which arguably may be more sensitive to some pathological changes. However, due to the relative infancy of research in vMMN compared to aMMN in clinical populations its potential for clinical application is not yet fully appreciated. The aim of this review and meta-analysis therefore is to present, in a detailed systematic manner, the findings from clinically-based vMMN studies, to discuss their potential impact and application, to raise awareness of this measure and to improve our understanding of disease upon fundamental aspects of visual information processing.

Resting-state glutamatergic neurotransmission is related to the peak latency of the auditory mismatch negativity (MMN) for duration deviants: An (1)H-MRS-EEG study.

Mismatch negativity (MMN), an ERP elicited by a deviant stimulus in a train of standard stimuli, has been suggested to be associated to glutamatergic neurotransmission, mediated by glutamatergic NMDA receptors. In this study, we examined the relationship between interindividual variation of (1)H-MRS-measured glutamate+glutamine (Glx) in the superior temporal gyrus and MMN for duration and frequency deviants in 19 healthy young adults (9 male). We found a significant relationship between the peak latency of the duration-MMN peak and creatine-scaled Glx (p = .0003, η(2) = .43), with increased Glx level being associated to earlier peak of the duration-MMN (r = -.63). In contrast, the amplitude of the duration-MMN was not related to Glx. There was no significant relationship between Glx and the frequency-MMN. The present study is the first to demonstrate that interindividual variation in the glutamatergic neurotransmission affects the MMN response in healthy individuals.