Takako Fujioka - US grants

The Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences offers postdoctoral research fellowships to provide opportunities for recent doctoral graduates to obtain additional training, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden their scientific horizons beyond their undergraduate and graduate training. Postdoctoral fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including at foreign locations. This postdoctoral fellowship award supports a rising interdisciplinary scholar investigating neural oscillatory and social personality correlates for perception and performance of musical joint-action. Fast-paced and dynamically adaptive sensorimotor interaction can be seen in a group of musicians playing together on a stage. Individuals have to constantly anticipate and perceive the ongoing interplay between other agents in order to efficiently organize and perform their own actions. Previous behavioral research has determined that timing information plays a key role in the dynamics of such sensorimotor coordination. Recent work employing non-invasive brain wave recording has also started to shape an understanding of how the brain processes timing information for rhythmic coordination, specifically during music-making. Given existing evidence that these brain activities can facilitate an understanding of others' actions even through mere observation, this research team is interested in the patterns of neural activity that occur as an individual listens to coordinated musical performance, and whether such perceptual processes are also related to the listener's social awareness and dispositional nature. To answer these questions, the proposed project integrates approaches from behavioral and brain research and topics across the fields of music perception, neurophysiology, and social cognition. As a result, the project contributes to an emerging interdisciplinary area of research aimed at investigating complex human social interaction across a variety of contexts. Because music-making has long been associated with social, cultural, and therapeutic activities, the findings of the proposed project will also have significant implications for rehabilitation and intervention programs aimed at 1) increasing social skills and facilitating social awareness for those with challenges in social interaction, and 2) improving sensorimotor deficits through the design of novel approaches with music therapy.

Previous research by the fellow has successfully identified a number of physical and informational factors that affect the patterning of spatiotemporal coordination during the interpersonal coordination of simple rhythmic limb and body movements. Through integration with the mentor's work on the neural oscillatory mechanisms that support sensorimotor rhythmic timing and movement prediction, this project provides a unique opportunity to test the hypothesis that behavioral processes of perception, prediction, and production during musical joint-action entail effective modulation in the patterning of neural beta-band oscillations, which may also be related to specific social/personality characteristics of an individual. Specifically, the project employs EEG recording while individuals listen to rhythmic musical patterns produced by a pair of musicians exhibiting a variety of leader-follower relationships. Beta-band modulation during listening to these musical performances will be evaluated with respect to the leader-follower asymmetry between the performers as perceived by the listener. The project further examines how beta-band oscillatory activities are related to an individual's performance within a rhythmic coordination task, and to self-report measures of the individual's locus of control and perspective-taking characteristics. Finding links between neural oscillations during the perception and production of joint musical behaviors will constitute a major advance in the scientific understanding of how the brain supports functional social interaction. The project will therefore establish a new interdisciplinary neural-behavior approach for investigating joint-action mechanisms within an ecologically valid and socio-culturally meaningful musical context.