Duet playing in dementia care: a new therapeutic music technology.

Purpose: Supporting the relational worlds of people living with dementia, especially the spousal dyad, is a growing focus in dementia care as is advancing the therapeutic use of music in dementia care. This paper describes a mixed-methods, multi-phase, iterative research study designed to develop the Music Memory Makers (MMM) Duet System, a novel therapeutic music technology, that allows non-musicians to play a personalized repertoire of songs arranged as duets.

Methods: Following a pilot phase to iteratively assess and refine the MMM Duet System for recreational and therapeutic purposes, multiple sources of data were used to investigate five older spousal dyads' experiences with the system, two couples living with dementia and three who were not.

Motor-related cortical oscillations distinguish one's own from a partner's contributions to a joint action.

The ability to distinguish between one's own and others' actions is a requirement for successful joint action. Such a distinction might be supported by dissociable motor activity underlying each partner's individual contributions to the joint action. However, little research has directly compared motor activity associated with one's own vs.

A practical guide to EEG hyperscanning in joint action research: from motivation to implementation.

Developments in cognitive neuroscience have led to the emergence of hyperscanning, the simultaneous measurement of brain activity from multiple people. Hyperscanning is useful for investigating social cognition, including joint action, because of its ability to capture neural processes that occur within and between people as they coordinate actions toward a shared goal. Here, we provide a practical guide for researchers considering using hyperscanning to study joint action and seeking to avoid frequently raised concerns from hyperscanning skeptics.

Not just in sync: Relations between partners' actions influence the sense of joint agency during joint action.

When people perform joint actions together, they often experience a sense of joint agency ("we did that together"). The current study investigated whether relations between partners' actions within joint actions that require precise interpersonal synchrony influence joint agency, above and beyond the degree of synchrony partners achieve. We employed a mixed-methods approach that combined a quantitative experiment with a qualitative analysis of post-experiment interviews.

The auditory P2 differentiates self- from partner-produced sounds during joint action: Contributions of self-specific attenuation and temporal orienting of attention.

Sensory attenuation of the auditory P2 event-related potential (ERP) has been shown to differentiate the sensory consequences of one's own from others' action in joint action contexts. However, recent evidence suggests that when people coordinate joint actions over time, temporal orienting of attention might simultaneously contribute to enhancing the auditory P2. The current study employed a joint tapping task in which partners produced tone sequences together to examine whether temporal orienting influences auditory ERP amplitudes during the time window of self-other differentiation.

Alpha oscillations related to self-other integration and distinction during live orchestral performance: A naturalistic case study.

Ensemble music performance requires musicians to achieve precise interpersonal coordination while maintaining autonomous control over their own actions. To do so, musicians dynamically shift between integrating other performers' actions into their own action plans and maintaining a distinction between their own and others' actions. Research in laboratory settings has shown that this dynamic process of self-other integration and distinction is indexed by sensorimotor alpha oscillations.

ERP evidence of heightened attentional response to visual stimuli in migraine headache disorders.

New findings from migraine studies have indicated that this common headache disorder is associated with anomalies in attentional processing. In tandem with the previous explorations, this study will provide evidence to show that visual attention is impacted by migraine headache disorders. 43 individuals were initially recruited in the migraine group and 33 people with non-migraine headache disorders were in the control group.

The sense of agency in joint action: An integrative review.

When people perform joint actions together, their individual actions (e.g., moving one end of a heavy couch) must be coordinated to achieve a collective goal (e.

Sensory Attenuation of the Auditory P2 Differentiates Self- from Partner-Produced Sounds during Joint Action.

Successful human interaction relies on people's ability to differentiate between the sensory consequences of their own and others' actions. Research in solo action contexts has identified sensory attenuation, that is, the selective perceptual or neural dampening of the sensory consequences of self-produced actions, as a potential marker of the distinction between self- and externally produced sensory consequences. However, very little research has examined whether sensory attenuation distinguishes self- from partner-produced sensory consequences in joint action contexts.

The motor-related brain activity that supports joint action: A review.

Recent years have seen a rapid increase in research investigating the motor-related brain activity that supports joint action. This research has employed a variety of joint action tasks and an array of neuroimaging techniques, including fMRI, fNIRS, EEG, and TMS. In this review, we provide an overview of this research to delineate what is known about the motor-related brain activity that contributes to joint action and to highlight key questions for future research.

Does the min-counting strategy for simple addition become automatized in educated adults? A behavioural and ERP study of the size congruency effect.

Recent studies have proposed that the sum-counting strategy for simple addition (i.e., count up of the summed value of the two operands one by one) used at early age becomes automatized in adults, challenging the long held view that skilled adults solve simple addition problems by fact retrieval.

Shared credit for shared success: Successful joint performance strengthens the sense of joint agency.

When people perform joint actions together, they experience a sense of joint agency, or shared control over actions and their effects. The current study examined how internal and external cues related to the success of a joint action influence joint agency. In three experiments, partners coordinated their actions to produce eight-tone sequences that matched a metronome pace.

The predictability of a partner's actions modulates the sense of joint agency.

When people coordinate their actions with others, they experience a sense of joint agency, i.e., shared control over actions and their consequences.

Mutual coordination strengthens the sense of joint agency in cooperative joint action.

Philosophers have proposed that when people coordinate their actions with others they may experience a sense of joint agency, or shared control over actions and their effects. However, little empirical work has investigated the sense of joint agency. In the current study, pairs coordinated their actions to produce tone sequences and then rated their sense of joint agency on a scale ranging from shared to independent control.

It's not just my fault: Neural correlates of feedback processing in solo and joint action.

People often coordinate their actions with others' in pursuit of shared goals, yet little research has examined the neural processes by which people monitor whether shared goals have been achieved. The current study compared event-related potentials elicited by feedback indicating joint errors (resulting from two people's coordinated actions) and individual errors (resulting from one's own or another person's observed actions). Joint errors elicited a reduced feedback-related negativity (FRN) and P3a relative to own errors, and an enhanced FRN relative to observed errors.

The sound of you and me: Novices represent shared goals in joint action.

People performing joint actions coordinate their individual actions with each other to achieve a shared goal. The current study investigated the mental representations that are formed when people learn a new skill as part of a joint action. In a musical transfer-of-learning paradigm, piano novices first learned to perform simple melodies in the joint action context of coordinating with an accompanist to produce musical duets.

Sensory attenuation for jointly produced action effects.

Successful joint action often requires people to distinguish between their own and others' contributions to a shared goal. One mechanism that is thought to underlie a self-other distinction is sensory attenuation, whereby the sensory consequences of one's own actions are reduced compared to other sensory events. Previous research has shown that the auditory N1 event-related potential (ERP) response is reduced for self-generated compared to externally generated tones.

Monitoring individual and joint action outcomes in duet music performance.

We investigated whether people monitor the outcomes of their own and their partners' individual actions as well as the outcome of their combined actions when performing joint actions together. Pairs of pianists memorized both parts of a piano duet. Each pianist then performed one part while their partner performed the other; EEG was recorded from both.

Temporal coordination between performing musicians.

Many common behaviours require people to coordinate the timing of their actions with the timing of others' actions. We examined whether representations of musicians' actions are activated in coperformers with whom they must coordinate their actions in time and whether coperformers simulate each other's actions using their own motor systems during temporal coordination. Pianists performed right-hand melodies along with simple or complex left-hand accompaniments produced by themselves or by another pianist.

Temporal coordination and adaptation to rate change in music performance.

People often coordinate their actions with sequences that exhibit temporal variability and unfold at multiple periodicities. We compared oscillator- and timekeeper-based accounts of temporal coordination by examining musicians' coordination of rhythmic musical sequences with a metronome that gradually changed rate at the end of a musical phrase (Experiment 1) or at the beginning of a phrase (Experiment 2). The rhythms contained events that occurred at the same periodic rate as the metronome and at half the period.

Sequential and biomechanical factors constrain timing and motion in tapping.

The authors examined how timing accuracy in tapping sequences is influenced by sequential effects of preceding finger movements and biomechanical interdependencies among fingers. Skilled pianists tapped sequences at 3 rates; in each sequence, a finger whose motion was more or less independent of other fingers' motion was preceded by a finger to which it was more or less coupled. Less independent fingers and those preceded by a more coupled finger showed large timing errors and change in motion because of the preceding finger's motion.

Cognitive and biomechanical influences in pianists' finger tapping.

Movement sequences such as typing or tapping display important interactions among finger movements arising from anticipatory motion (preparing for upcoming events) and coupling (non-independence among fingers). We examined pianists' finger tapping for the influence of cognitive chunking processes and biomechanical coupling constraints. In a synchronization-continuation task, pianists repeatedly tapped four-finger sequences that differed in terms of the chunks that formed subsequences and in the transitions among physically adjacent or non-adjacent fingers.

Omitting details from post-event information: are true and false memory affected in the same way?

Participants who witness an event and later receive post-event information that omits a critical scene are less likely to recall and to recognise that scene than are participants who receive no post-event information (Wright, Loftus, & Hall, 2001). The present study used the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, in which participants study lists of semantic associates (e.g.

Modularity and intersection of "what", "where" and "how" processing of visual stimuli: a new method of FMRI localization.

Research on the modularity of perceptual and cognitive processes has often pointed to a ventral-dorsal distinction in cortical pathways that depend upon the nature of the stimuli and the task. However, it is not clear whether the dorsal, occipital-parietal stream specializes in locating visual objects (i.e.