Exploring Attention, Cognitive Load and Brain Connectivity During Music Listening

P. 35–35.

Provorova A., Kulikova S.

The purpose of this research was to investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying the ability to read musical notations. Reading musical notations requires efficient integration of auditory and visual stimuli. Such integration is likely to be provided by means of functional connectivity between different brain regions. Furthermore, it should require maintaining a certain level of continuous attention and exert a notable cognitive load. In this study we aimed to evaluate the level of attention, cognitive load and functional brain connectivity during simultaneous music listening and reading music notations in an experimental group of 31 musicians and a control group of 13 people without any music education. We hypothesized that these metrics, measured using EEG (electroencephalography), change with the difficulty of the musical task, which depends on the music duration, tempo and the graphical representation of the musical scores. Higher tempo should require processing more audial information withing the same time period, thus, increasing the difficulty of the task. Longer excerpts should have greater load on the working memory and require maintaining attention for a longer time. Finally, the amount of information contained in the graphical representation of the musical scores (pitch, rhythm) may also be crucial for efficient  integration of auditory and visual stimuli. In our study, we used 5 types of visual representations for the musical scores: unmodified (1), containing information only about the pitch(2) or rhythm (3), containing information the pitch in a verbal form (ex. “do, mi, sol, etc.”, 4), and with dots for each sound (no information about pitch and rhythm). Such experimental design allowed us to see how concept construction during reading music notation depends on the available information and reflect the functional interactions between different brain regions that occur during the formation and processing of concepts in the musical domain.

Keywords: музыка, music, внимание, attention, EEG, ЭЭГ, cognitive load, когнитивная нагрузка, brain connectivity, функциональная связность

In book

Schemas In Language, Music, And Visual Cognition: Book of Abstracts

Antonovic M., Hampe B., Jackendoff R., Oakley T., Provorova A., Kulikova S., Asic T., Bakalova M., Fan D. Niš: Faculty of Philosophy, University of Nis, 2024.