Keynote lectures
Developmental contributions to human motor skill learning
Dr. Virginia Penhune
Concordia University
www-psychology.concordia.ca/fac/penhune
Motor skills are ubiquitous in everyday life. While certain skills, such as walking, are largely innate, most, such as writing and playing the piano, are acquired through practice. In the past decade, numerous studies have investigated the behavioural and neural underpinnings of motor skill learning in adults; however, very little is known about how children acquire new motor skills. Recent evidence from paediatric structural neuroimaging research shows on-going changes in brain systems important for motor learning. Thus, maturational changes in the brain coincide with and likely underlie changes in motor abilities across development. This talk will consider two types of developmental contributions to skill learning. First, I will discuss recent work examining developmental changes in the ability to learn motor skills in school-age children. Overall, results showed a developmental progression in motor sequence learning within and across days of practice. Second, I will review a series of experiments examining the effect of early musical training (before age seven) on motor learning and performance later in life. The results of these experiments show that early-trained musicians show better sensorimotor synchronization than late-trained musicians matched for years of experience. Taken together, these studies suggest that there may be a sensitive period for motor learning in childhood, similar to that for language learning.
How temporal lobe lesion affects musical emotion?
Dr. Séverine Samson
University of Lille-Nord de France
JE2497 & Epilepsy Unit, La Salpêtrière Hospital, Paris, France
Studies of patients who have undergone unilateral temporal lobe resection for the relief of intractable epilepsy have demonstrated impaired memory and emotional processing of music providing considerable advances in the cognitive neuroscience of music. In this presentation, I will review our previous findings demonstrating the involvement of the amygdala and of the parahippocampal cortex in recognizing emotion induced by musical listening. Then, recent data illustrating how emotional content of stimuli influences musical memory will be reported. All these results will be presented in relation to the specificity of music and the relevance of examining musical emotion and its relation to memory will be discussed opening up interesting paths.
Emotions evoked by music: Characteristics, determinants, and foundations
Dr. Marcel Zentner
University of York, UK
One reason for the universal appeal of music lies in the emotional rewards that music offers to its listeners. But what makes these rewards so special? A series of studies will be presented in which my collaborators and I examined emotions that can (and cannot) be induced by music – a line of work that eventually led to a model of musical emotions, comprising nine categories of “musical emotions”. After touching on the determinants of musical emotion induction I will turn to the foundations of affective responses to music both developmental and biological. In particular, I will present evidence (including videotaped demonstrations) for infants’ preference of consonance over dissonance and for musical entrainment to movement in infants – a phenomenon resembling dancing. I will finish my presentation with some conclusions about this work and also discuss plans for future research and collaborations.