Neural mechanisms underlying valence inferences to sound: The role of the right angular gyrus

Abstract

We frequently infer others' intentions based on non-verbal auditory cues. Although the brain underpinnings of social cognition have been extensively studied, no empirical work has yet examined the impact of musical structure manipulation on the neural processing of emotional valence during mental state inferences. We used a novel sound-based theory-of-mind paradigm in which participants categorized stimuli of different sensory dissonance level in terms of positive/negative valence. Whilst consistent with previous studies which propose facilitated encoding of consonances, our results demonstrated that distinct levels of consonance/dissonance elicited differential influences on the right angular gyrus, an area implicated in mental state attribution and attention reorienting processes. Functional and effective connectivity analyses further showed that consonances modulated a specific inhibitory interaction from associative memory to mental state attribution substrates. Following evidence suggesting that individuals with autism may process social affective cues differently, we assessed the relationship between participants' task performance and self-reported autistic traits in clinically typical adults. Higher scores on the social cognition scales of the AQ were associated with deficits in recognising positive valence in consonant sound cues. These findings are discussed with respect to Bayesian perspectives on autistic perception, which highlight a functional failure to optimize precision in relation to prior beliefs.

Anterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortex response to systematically controlled tonal dissonance during passive music listening

“…The results did not reveal any suprathreshold activations at the level of the parahippocampal gyrus (even after small volume correction). This suggests that the involvement of the parahippocampal gyrus in previous studies targeting musical dissonance could be mediating other functions, such as associative or contextual memory (Aminoff, Kveraga, & Bar, 2013;Bar, Aminoff, & Schacter, 2008;Bravo, Cross, Hawkins, et al, 2017), possibly linked to the cognitive processes initiated by the tasks themselves which participants were instructed to perform within these previous studies (e.g., emotion labeling/categorization) (Blood et al, 1999;Bravo, Cross, Hawkins, et al, 2017;Gosselin et al, 2006;Koelsch et al, 2006).…”

“…In order to assess whether tonalness could also be an explanatory variable for the signal changes revealed in the comparison between dissonant and consonant variations, we used parametric modulation analysis and subsequently compared valence‐modulated effects with a model based on tonalness level. Previous behavioral studies have shown that the degree of tonalness correlates strongly with the percept of valence (Bravo, ; Bravo, Cross, Hawkins, et al, ; Bravo, Cross, Stamatakis, & Rohrmeier, ). Hence, this analysis could further allow to dissociate the effect of tonalness and valence on brain activity.…”

“…Although researchers had initially found the ACC engaged only during conflict between response representations (Milham et al, 2001;Nelson, Reuter-Lorenz, Sylvester, Jonides, & Smith, 2003;van Veen et al, 2001), which suggested that the ACC could be selectively triggered by such conflicts; successive studies have shown that the ACC can also be engaged during conflicts between other types of semantic and conceptual representations (Badre & Wagner, 2004;van Veen & Carter, 2005;Weissman, Giesbrecht, Song, Mangun, & Woldorff, 2003). Music cognition research has suggested that low tonalness sequences could be inherently conflict-demanding due to their tendency towards equivocal referential tonal centers (Bonin & Smilek, 2016;Huron, 2008;Johnson-Laird, Kang, & Chang, 2012;Krumhansl & Kessler, 1982;Parncutt, 1989Parncutt, , 2011Temperley, 2010), which in turn has been associated with the listeners' experience of increased musical tension (Bigand et al, 1996;Bigand & Parncutt, 1999;Blood et al, 1999;Bravo, Cross, Hawkins, et al, 2017;Lerdahl & Krumhansl, 2007;Schellenberg & Trehub, 1994;Temperley, 2010). We therefore believe that the enhanced activation of the rostral ACC (when comparing dissonant against consonant sequences) could also be explained in terms of conflict monitoring processes.…”

Increased Functional Connectivity of the Angular Gyrus During Imagined Music Performance

“…This result is consistent with previous studies suggesting that the H/PHG mediates memory-aided constructive simulation (Andrews-Hanna, 2012), which is required in imagined music performance. It might also be relevant to the recent fMRI study reporting that the functional connectivity between the AG and the parahippocampal cortex was increased during a sound-based theory-of-mind task, in which participants categorized stimuli of different sensory dissonance level in terms of positive/negative valence (Bravo et al, 2017).…”

“…Music evokes emotions and influences moods (Koelsch, 2014). Using a novel sound-based theory-of-mind paradigm, a recent study (Bravo et al, 2017) suggested that the AG contributes to valence inferences to sound. Music performance is not just manipulation of a musical instrument but requires the control of various domains of information processing in performers, such as attention (Meltzer et al, 2015), working memory, musical semantics (Koelsch, 2011), emotion regulation, musical expressivity (Cespedes-Guevara and Eerola, 2018), and mentalizing (Downey et al, 2013; Cespedes-Guevara and Eerola, 2018).…”