Biology subjects

Tillmann, B.

Publications and source records attributed to Tillmann, B..

12 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

A touch that lingers: synchronized patting strengthens neural tracking of auditory rhythm in newborns

Rhythmic auditory stimulation in early life rarely occurs in isolation. Caregivers naturally combine singing and speech with rhythmic touch, rocking, and visual cues. Newborns are sensitive to auditory rhythm from birth, yet little is known about how temporally aligned information across sensory modalities shapes the neural encoding of auditory rhythmic structure. Here, we tested whether rhythmic touch can alter how the newborn brain tracks an ongoing auditory signal beyond the period of tactile stimulation. We recorded high-density electroencephalography from full-term newborns (N = 40), 1-3 days after birth, while they were exposed to recorded French lullabies presented either alone or accompanied by gentle patting synchronized with the metrically strong beat. Patting was delivered intermittently, allowing us to compare neural responses to lullabies across conditions, notably during periods without concurrent tactile stimulation. We quantified neural tracking of the lullabies using brain-stimulus coherence and temporal response function modeling. Newborns' neural activity synchronized with the rhythmic structure of the lullabies at frequencies corresponding to both the beat and the metrically accented strong beat. Critically, neural tracking was stronger when the lullabies had been accompanied by synchronized touch than when they were presented alone, and this enhancement persisted during subsequent periods in which no touch was delivered. Although rhythmic touch enhanced tracking in newborns with both weaker and stronger auditory-only tracking, there was a larger gain in those who initially showed weaker auditory tracking. Together, our findings reveal that the newborn brain exploits rhythmic touch to strengthen its encoding of auditory rhythm, and that this benefit outlasts the touch itself. This provides neural evidence that patting an infant in time with a song, a caregiving practice shared across cultures, does more than simply provide a tactile stimulation. It shapes how the newborn brain encodes the song's rhythm.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2026

Effect of tempo on newborns' neural processing of auditory rhythm: Emergence of sensitivity to metrical structure

Rhythm perception ability underpins music and language processing, and its developmental origins trace back to the earliest periods of life. While most rhythm patterns contain a variety of inter-onset intervals, listeners typically extract a steady underlying beat periodicity, as well as beat grouping periodicities (groups of two or three beats will be at frequencies 1/2 or 1/3, respectively, of that of the primary beat), forming a metrical hierarchy. While the developing brain can track auditory rhythm before birth, a previous study found that neural sensitivity to faster beat-related periodicities emerges early in third trimester of gestation, whereas encoding of slower metrical structure periodicities only appears closer to term birth. However, as rhythm patterns were only presented at one tempo, neural sensitivity to metrical structure could not be disentangled from sensitivity to tempo during early development. Thus, here we presented auditory rhythmic sequences at two different tempi and used high-resolution electroencephalography to measure neural sensitivity to their encoding in full-term newborns and young adults. Adults demonstrated a similar sensitivity to metrical structure across tempi, with greatest response at the duple metrical frequency regardless of tempo. Newborn neural responses, by contrast, were tempo-dependent, displaying markedly different response patterns across beat and meter frequencies at the different tempi. Together, these results reveal that tempo and metrical structure interact in shaping how the neonatal brain encodes auditory rhythm, suggesting that early neural processing may be constrained in its ability to track slower periodicities, and highlighting a developmental shift in the relative contributions of tempo and metrical structure to rhythmic processing. Research HighlightsO_LIAdults show stable sensitivity to metrical structure across tempi, with peak responses at the duple level. C_LIO_LINewborns neural responses are tempo-dependent, showing distinct patterns across beat and metrical frequencies. C_LIO_LITempo and metrical structure jointly shape neural encoding of rhythm in the brain, revealing a developmental shift in their relative contributions. C_LI

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2026

Impaired temporal prediction mechanisms in dyslexia

Effective speech analysis involves deconstructing the acoustic signal into identifiable linguistic units, which depends on the ability to recognize and anticipate temporal patterns within the speech stream. However, these processes may be less efficient in individuals with dyslexia. This study investigated the effects of temporal context and related temporal predictions in dyslexic adult participants and matched control participants, using an auditory oddball task with non-verbal stimuli. Pure tones were presented in sequences, and participants were requested to discriminate the pitch of target stimuli. The temporal intervals between the sounds varied in regularity across the sequences, thereby creating contexts with different levels of temporal predictability. At the end of each sequence, participants were prompted to evaluate the perceived rhythmicity of the sequence and to assess their own performance in the auditory discrimination task. Dyslexic participants demonstrated overall lower accuracy in discriminating target sounds than controls. They also showed reduced influence of the temporal context of the sequences on response times, while controls responded faster in sequences that were temporally more regular and predictable. Additionally, individuals with dyslexia perceived the rhythmicity of sound sequences less accurately, overestimating the temporal regularity in irregular sequences and underestimating it in regular sequences. They also reported lower overall confidence in their ability to perform the task compared to control participants. Altogether, these findings provide converging evidence for altered temporal prediction abilities in dyslexia, which may impact auditory perception and then impair language processing.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

The interplay between executive functions and updating predictive representations

Modifying habits, particularly unwanted behaviors, is often challenging. Cognitive research has focused on understanding the mechanisms underlying habit formation and how habits can be rewired. A key mechanism is statistical learning, the continuous, implicit extraction of probabilistic patterns from the environment, which forms the basis of predictive processing. However, the interplay between executive functions (EF) and the rewiring - or updating - of these probabilistic representations remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we conducted an experiment consisting of four sessions: 1) Learning Phase - acquisition of probabilistic representations, 2) Rewiring Phase - updating these probabilistic representations, 3) Retrieval Phase - accessing learned representations, and 4) EF assessment, targeting five key aspects: attentional control, inhibition, working memory, flexibility, and verbal fluency. We focused on the relationship between these EF measures and the updating of previously acquired knowledge using an interindividual differences approach. Our results revealed a positive relationship between rewiring and inhibition, suggesting that better inhibitory control may facilitate the adaptive restructuring of probabilistic predictive representations. Conversely, a negative relationship was identified between rewiring and semantic fluency, implying that certain underlying aspects of verbal fluency tasks, such as access to long-term memory representations, may hinder the updating process. We interpret this relationship through the lens of competitive memory network models. Our findings indicate that the rewiring of implicit probabilistic representations is a multifaceted cognitive process requiring both the suppression of proactive interference from prior knowledge through cognitive inhibition and a strong reliance on model-free functioning.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

Role of the prefrontal cortex in musical and verbal short-term memory: A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study

Auditory short-term memory (STM) is a key process in auditory cognition, with evidence for partly distinct networks subtending musical and verbal STM. The delayed matching-to-sample task (DMST) paradigm has been found suitable for comparing musical and verbal STM and for manipulating memory load. In this study, musical and verbal DMSTs were investigated with measures of activity in frontal areas with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS): Experiment 1 compared musical and verbal DMSTs with a low-level perception task (that does not entail encoding, retention, or retrieval of information), to identify frontal regions involved in memory processes. Experiment 2 manipulated memory load for musical and verbal materials to uncover frontal brain regions showing parametric changes in activity with load and their potential differences between musical and verbal materials. A FIR model was used to deconvolute fNIRS signals across successive trials without making assumptions with respect to the shape of the hemodynamic response in a DMST. Results revealed the involvement of the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and inferior frontal gyri (IFG), but not of the superior frontal gyri (SFG) in both experiments, in keeping with previously reported neuroimaging data (including fMRI). Experiment 2 demonstrated a parametric variation of activity with memory load in bilateral IFGs during the maintenance period, with opposite directions for musical and verbal materials. Activity in the IFGs increased with memory load for verbal sound sequences, in keeping with previous results with n-back tasks. The decreased activity with memory load observed with musical sequences is discussed in relation to previous research on auditory STM rehearsal strategies. This study highlights fNIRS as a promising tool for investigating musical and verbal STM not only for typical populations, but also for populations with developmental language disorders associated with functional alterations in auditory STM.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

Evidence for a competitive relationship between executive functions and statistical learning

The ability of the brain to extract patterns from the environment and predict future events, known as statistical learning, has been proposed to interact in a competitive manner with prefrontal lobe related networks and their characteristic cognitive or executive functions. However, it remains unclear whether these cognitive functions also show competitive relationship with implicit statistical learning across individuals and at the level of latent executive function components. In order to address this currently unknown aspect, we investigated, in two independent experiments (NStudy1 = 186, NStudy2 = 157), the relationship between implicit statistical learning, measured by the Alternating Serial Reaction Time task, and executive functions, measured by multiple neuropsychological tests. In both studies, a modest, but consistent negative correlation between implicit statistical learning and most executive function measures was observed. Factor analysis further revealed that a factor representing the verbal fluency and complex working memory seemed to drive these negative correlations. Thus, an antagonism between implicit statistical learning and executive functions might specifically be mediated by updating component of executive functions or/and long-term memory access.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2021

Consonance perception in congenital amusia: behavioral and brain responses to harmonicity and beating cues

Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by difficulties in the perception and production of music, including the perception of consonance and dissonance, or the judgment of certain combinations of pitches as more pleasant than others. Two perceptual cues for dissonance are inharmonicity (the lack of a common fundamental frequency between components) and beating (amplitude fluctuations produced by close, interacting frequency components). In the presence of inharmonicities or beats, amusics have previously been reported to be insensitive to inharmonicity, but to exhibit normal sensitivity to beats. In the present study, we measured adaptive discrimination thresholds in amusic participants and found elevated thresholds for both cues. We recorded EEG and measured the mismatch negativity (MMN) in evoked potentials to consonance and dissonance deviants in an oddball paradigm. The amplitude of the MMN response was similar overall for amusics and controls, but while control participants showed a stronger MMN to harmonicity cues than to beating cues, amusic participants showed a stronger MMN to beating cues than to harmonicity cues. These findings suggest that initial encoding of consonance cues may be intact in amusia despite impaired behavioral performance, but that the relative weight of non-spectral cues may be increased for amusic individuals.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2021

Enhanced mismatch negativity responses in harmonic compared to inharmonic sound sequences

Many natural sounds have frequency spectra composed of integer multiples of a fundamental frequency. This property, known as harmonicity, plays an important role in auditory information processing. However, the extent to which harmonicity influences the processing of sound features beyond pitch is still unclear. This is interesting because harmonic sounds have lower information entropy than inharmonic sounds. According to predictive processing accounts of perception, this property could produce more salient neural responses due to the brains weighting of sensory signals according to their uncertainty. In the present study, we used electroencephalography to investigate brain responses to harmonic and inharmonic sounds commonly occurring in music: piano tones and hi-hat cymbal sounds. In a multi-feature oddball paradigm, we measured mismatch negativity (MMN) and P3a responses to timbre, intensity, and location deviants in listeners with and without congenital amusia--an impairment of pitch processing. As hypothesized, we observed larger amplitudes and earlier latencies (for both MMN and P3a) in harmonic compared to inharmonic sounds. These harmonicity effects were modulated by sound feature. Moreover, the difference in P3a latency between harmonic and inharmonic sounds was larger for controls than amusics. We propose an explanation of these results based on predictive coding and discuss the relationship between harmonicity, information entropy, and precision weighting of prediction errors.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2020

Pre-attentive processing of neutral and emotional sounds in congenital amusia

Congenital amusia is a life-long deficit of musical processing. This deficit can extend to the processing of language and in particular, emotional prosody. In a previous behavioral study, we revealed that while amusic individuals had difficulties in explicitly recognizing emotions for short vowels, they rated the emotional intensity of these same vowels as did their matched control participants. This finding led to the hypothesis that congenital amusics might be impaired for explicit emotional prosody recognition, but not for its implicit processing. With the aim to investigate amusics automatic processing of prosody, the present study measured electroencephalography (EEG) when participants listened passively to vowels presented within an oddball paradigm. Emotionally neutral vowel served as the standard and either emotional (anger and sadness) or neutral vowels as deviants. Evoked potentials were compared between participants with congenital amusia and control participants matched in age, education, and musical training. The MMN was rather preserved for all deviants in amusia, whereas an earlier negative component was found decreased in amplitude in amusics compared to controls for the neutral and sadness deviants. For the most salient deviant (anger), the P3a was decreased in amplitude for amusics compared to controls. These results showed some preserved automatic detection of emotional deviance in amusia despite an early deficit to process subtle acoustic changes. In addition, the automatic attentional shift in response to salient deviants at later processing stages was reduced in amusics in comparison to the controls. In the three ERPs related to the deviance, between-group differences were larger over bilateral prefrontal areas, previously shown to display functional impairments in congenital amusia. Our present study thus provides further understanding of the dichotomy between implicit and explicit processing in congenital amusia, in particular for vocal stimuli with emotional content.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2020

Listeners with congenital amusia are sensitive to context uncertainty in melodic sequences

In typical listeners, the perceptual salience of a surprising auditory event depends on the uncertainty of its context. For example, in melodies, pitch deviants are more easily detected and generate larger neural responses when the context is highly predictable than when it is less so. However, it is not known whether amusic listeners with abnormal pitch processing are sensitive to the degree of uncertainty of pitch sequences and, if so, whether they are to a different extent than typical non-musician listeners. To answer this question, we manipulated the uncertainty of short melodies while participants with and without congenital amusia underwent EEG recordings in a passive listening task. Uncertainty was manipulated by presenting melodies with different levels of complexity and familiarity, under the assumption that simpler and more familiar patterns would enhance pitch predictability. We recorded mismatch negativity (MMN) responses to pitch, intensity, timbre, location, and rhythm deviants as a measure of auditory surprise. In both participant groups, we observed reduced MMN amplitudes and longer peak latencies for all sound features with increasing levels of complexity, and putative familiarity effects only for intensity deviants. No significant group-by-complexity or group-by-familiarity interactions were detected. However, in contrast to previous studies, pitch MMN responses in amusics were disrupted in high complexity and unfamiliar melodies. The present results thus indicate that amusics are sensitive to the uncertainty of melodic sequences and that preattentive auditory change detection is greatly spared in this population across sound features and levels of predictability. However, our findings also hint at pitch-specific impairments in this population when uncertainty is high, thus suggesting that pitch processing under high uncertainty conditions requires an intact frontotemporal loop.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

Emotional prosody in congenital amusia: impaired and spared processes

Congenital amusia is a lifelong deficit of music processing, in particular of pitch processing. Most research investigating this neurodevelopmental disorder has focused on music perception, but pitch also has a critical role for intentional and emotional prosody in speech. Two previous studies investigating amusics emotional prosody recognition have shown either some deficit or no deficit (compared to controls). However, these previous studies have used only long sentence stimuli, which allow for limited control over acoustic content. Here, we tested amusic individuals for emotional prosody perception in sentences and vowels. For each type of material, participants performed an emotion categorization task, followed by intensity ratings of the recognized emotion. Compared to controls, amusic individuals had similar recognition of emotion in sentences, but poorer performance in vowels, especially when distinguishing sad and neutral stimuli. These lower performances in amusics were linked with difficulties in processing pitch and spectro-temporal parameters of the vowel stimuli. For emotion intensity, neither sentence nor vowel ratings differed between participant groups, suggesting preserved implicit processing of emotional prosody in amusia. These findings can be integrated into previous data showing preserved implicit processing of pitch and emotion in amusia alongside deficits in explicit recognition tasks. They are thus further supporting the hypothesis of impaired conscious analysis of pitch and timbre in this neurodevelopmental disorder.\n\nHighlightsO_LIAmusics showed preserved emotional prosody recognition in sentences\nC_LIO_LIAmusics showed a deficit for emotional prosody recognition in short voice samples\nC_LIO_LIPreserved intensity ratings of emotions in amusia suggest spared implicit processes\nC_LI

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2017

New evidence of a rhythmic priming effect that enhances grammaticality judgments in children

Musical rhythm and the grammatical structure of language share a surprising number of characteristics that may be intrinsically related in child development. The present study aimed to understand the potential influence of musical rhythmic priming on subsequent spoken grammar task performance in children with typical development who were native speakers of English. Participants (ages 5 to 8 years) listened to rhythmically regular and irregular musical sequences (within-subjects design) followed by blocks of grammatically correct and incorrect sentences upon which they were asked to perform a grammaticality judgment task. Rhythmically regular musical sequences improved performance in grammaticality judgment compared to rhythmically irregular musical sequences. No such effect of rhythmic priming was found in two non-linguistic control tasks, suggesting a neural overlap between rhythm processing and mechanisms recruited during grammar processing. These findings build on previous research investigating the effect of rhythmic priming by extending the paradigm to a different language, testing a younger population, and employing non-language control tasks. These findings of an immediate influence of rhythm on grammar states (temporarily augmented grammaticality judgment performance) also converge with previous findings of associations between rhythm and grammar traits (stable, generalized grammar abilities) in children. Taken together, this study provides additional evidence for shared neural processing for language and music, and warrants future investigations of potentially beneficial effects of innovative musical material on language processing.

neuroscience↗