Social Cognition & MusicTommi Himberg - ISSSCCM 2009

"The endeavor to live in a shared, peaceful agreement with others is an extension of the endeavor to preserve oneself.

- B. Spinoza (Damasio 2003)

“Human beings, and only human beings, are biologically adapted for participating in collaborative activities involving shared goals and socially coordinated action plans.”

- M. Tomasello et al. 2005

Outline

music <=> social <=> cognition

features & mechanismsdevelopment and learningempathy and emotionsattention and shared intentionsentrainment

research applications

What is music for?

This video in YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9SNrL8RHEA

Motivation and definition

music as social activity - unique tool to investigate interpersonal interaction

sociality essential aspect of music-making

human evolution - we are a hypersocial species

emotion control, bonding, communication

isn’t all cognition social/individual?cognitive processes and mechanisms that facilitate social interaction

Development & learning

earliest interaction and communication (infant-directed speech) has many musical features (Trehub, Trainor, Trevarthen...)

lullabies - musical universalemotion regulation

language learning “gated” by social interaction? (Kuhl 2008)

segmentation, attention to important aspects of the information influx

social learning = culture?

Perception & attentionpriority of processing social information - faces, names

embodiment and mirror neuron systems

directing attention is a social process - gaze following

attention entrained to the rhythms of the environmentdynamic attention - Large & Jones 1999

dividing attention between monitoring own performance, that of partners and the emergent pattern (Keller 1999, Sawyer 2005, Benzon 2002)

Shared intentionality

Shared intentionality

intention reading (theory of mind)

cultural learning

motivation for sharing psychological states

shared representations - abstracting a beat together, metrical hierarchy etc.

Entrainment

a process by which two independent but coupled oscillators converge in period and phase

not unique to humans - inanimate objects “can” do it

unique ability for auditory-motor synchronisation to external referent

extreme from of prediction/expectation?

we know how we synchronise (see Repp 2005), the interesting question is what it “means” to us

Entrainment as bonding

many theories of adaptive role of music in evolution focus on its capabilities to facilitate social interaction and group bonding

larger groups have better chances of survivalindividual needs certain skills to be able to be a part of the group

these skills are genetically transmitted and selected for in evolution

emotional reward for being “together”

increased affiliation after successful synchronisation (Hove 2008)

Entrainment - expectations?Meyer (1956): music sets up expectations - they are met, delayed or denied -> emotional response

musical structures and reading minds -> predictability

entrainment -> extreme prediction!

but, it’s the errors that count! And, how they are corrected...

collaborative error correction (Vorberg 2005, Repp & Keller 2008)

is it an “error” or a piece of socially relevant information?

Errare humanum est

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Entrainment & communication

conversation - unintentional entrainment (Richardson et al. 2007, Shockley et al. 2003)

sign of agreement, conclusion (Gill 2008)

successful therapeutic intervention for dyslexia (Overy 2003)

musical communication

Summaryhumans are a “hypersocial” species

social emotion-regulation (aggression attenuation etc.)

communication, social learning, culture

motivation to share psychological states

music relies on many cognitive systems that underlie this “sociality”, including some that are species-specific --> when the hypersocial species gets on a super-social mode, it does music

interpersonal entrainment is an example of a neural - cognitive - emotional - social process necessary for music and other forms of communication.

Research implications

definition of a “cognitive system” - study “cognition in the wild” (Hutchins 1995)

focus on interaction - mutual influence, emergence...

comparative perspectives - the whole range of functions that music has, the whole range of systems and processes that subserve it

Thank you!

tommi.himberg@jyu.fi

http://www.twitter.com/tijh

http://www.facebook.com/himberg

http://mindsync.wordpress.com