Jiang Jun, Liu Fang, Zhou Linshu, Jiang Cunmei
Music College, Shanghai Normal University, Shanghai, China.
School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, UK.
Behav Brain Res. 2019 Feb 1;359:362-369. doi: 10.1016/j.bbr.2018.11.020. Epub 2018 Nov 17.
Music can convey meanings by imitating phenomena of the extramusical world, and these imitation-induced musical meanings can be understood by listeners. Although the human mirror system (HMS) is implicated in imitation, little is known about the HMS's role in making sense of meaning that derives from musical imitation. To answer this question, we used fMRI to examine listeners' brain activities during the processing of imitation-induced musical meaning with a cross-modal semantic priming paradigm. Eleven normal individuals and 11 individuals with congenital amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder of musical processing, participated in the experiment. Target pictures with either an upward or downward movement were primed by semantically congruent or incongruent melodic sequences characterized by the direction of pitch change (upward or downward). When contrasting the incongruent with the congruent condition between the two groups, we found greater activations in the left supramarginal gyrus/inferior parietal lobule and inferior frontal gyrus in normals but not in amusics. The implications of these findings in terms of the role of the HMS in understanding imitation-induced musical meaning are discussed.
音乐可以通过模仿音乐之外世界的现象来传达意义，并且这些由模仿产生的音乐意义能够被听众理解。尽管人类镜像系统（HMS）与模仿有关，但对于HMS在理解源自音乐模仿的意义方面所起的作用却知之甚少。为了回答这个问题，我们使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI），通过跨模态语义启动范式来检查听众在处理由模仿产生的音乐意义时的大脑活动。11名正常个体和11名患有先天性失歌症（一种音乐处理方面的神经发育障碍）的个体参与了该实验。以音高变化方向（向上或向下）为特征的语义一致或不一致的旋律序列，启动带有向上或向下运动的目标图片。当对比两组中不一致条件与一致条件时，我们发现正常个体的左侧缘上回/顶下小叶和额下回有更强的激活，而失歌症患者则没有。本文讨论了这些发现对于HMS在理解由模仿产生的音乐意义中所起作用的启示。
