Hippocampal place cells that are activated sequentially during active waking get reactivated in a temporally compressed (5-20 times) manner during slow-wave-sleep and quiet waking. The two-stage model of the hippocampus suggests that neural activity during awaking supports encoding function while temporally compressed reactivation (replay) supports consolidation. However, the mechanisms supporting different neural activity with different temporal scales during encoding and consolidation remain unclear. Based on the idea that acetylcholine modulates functional transition between encoding and consolidation, we tested whether the cholinergic modulation may adjust intrinsic network dynamics to support different temporal scales for these two modes of operation. Simulations demonstrate that cholinergic modulation of the calcium activated non-specific cationic (CAN) current and the synaptic transmission may be sufficient to switch the network dynamics between encoding and consolidation modes. When the CAN current is active and the synaptic transmission is suppressed, mimicking the high acetylcholine condition during active waking, a slow propagation of multiple spikes is evident. This activity resembles the firing pattern of place cells and time cells during active waking. On the other hand, when CAN current is suppressed and the synaptic transmission is intact, mimicking the low acetylcholine condition during slow-wave-sleep, a time compressed fast (∼10 times) activity propagation of the same set of cells is evident. This activity resembles the time compressed firing pattern of place cells during replay and pre-play, achieving a temporal compression factor in the range observed in vivo (5-20 times). These observations suggest that cholinergic system could adjust intrinsic network dynamics suitable for encoding and consolidation through the modulation of the CAN current and synaptic conductance in the hippocampus.

We investigated familiarity and preference judgments of participants toward a novel musical system. We exposed participants to tone sequences generated from a novel pitch probability profile. Afterward, we either asked participants to identify more familiar or we asked participants to identify preferred tone sequences in a two-alternative forced-choice task. The task paired a tone sequence generated from the pitch probability profile they had been exposed to and a tone sequence generated from another pitch probability profile at three levels of distinctiveness. We found that participants identified tone sequences as more familiar if they were generated from the same pitch probability profile which they had been exposed to. However, participants did not prefer these tone sequences. We interpret this relationship between familiarity and preference to be consistent with an inverted U-shaped relationship between knowledge and affect. The fact that participants identified tone sequences as even more familiar if they were generated from the more distinctive (caricatured) version of the pitch probability profile which they had been exposed to suggests that the statistical learning of the pitch probability profile is involved in gaining of musical knowledge.

Introduction To survive, organisms need to organize perceptual input into coherent, usable structures. Research has illuminated the potential role of frequency of occurrence and duration as cues to extract statistical regularities from our environment. Musical stimuli provide a unique opportunity to study how these cues are used to organize auditory input into higher level perceptual entities, i.e., pitch structure, and to assess the influence of cognitive schema. Methods To examine the relative importance of these two cues in pitch structure perception, we constructed novel tone sequences in which frequency of occurrence and duration cues were pitted against each other. We assessed perceived pitch structure in musically trained and untrained listeners using a probe tone paradigm. Results In all experiments, a 3-tiered hierarchy of pitch structure emerged, with highest ratings for tones of longer duration, next highest for shorter, more frequent tones and lowest for probe tones that did not occur in the sequence. The hierarchy did not reflect assimilation to Western tonal schema. Discussion Our results argue against theories positing the same mechanism for the processing of duration and frequency of occurrence, and that duration is weighted preferentially. We further suggest that the organization of perceptual information will proceed according to whatever information is relevant, available, and most easily acquired.

We report on a study conducted to extend our knowledge about the process of gaining a mental representation of music. Several studies, inspired by research on the statistical learning of language, have investigated statistical learning of sequential rules underlying tone sequences. Given that the mental representation of music correlates with distributional properties of music, we tested whether participants are able to abstract distributional information contained in tone sequences to form a mental representation. For this purpose, we created an unfamiliar music genre defined by an underlying tone distribution, to which 40 participants were exposed. Our stimuli allowed us to differentiate between sensitivity to the distributional properties contained in test stimuli and long term representation of the distributional properties of the music genre overall. Using a probe tone paradigm and a two-alternative forced choice discrimination task, we show that listeners are able to abstract distributional properties of music through mere exposure into a long term representation of music. This lends support to the idea that statistical learning is involved in the process of gaining musical knowledge.

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