Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, Montreal, QC H3A 2B4, Canada;
International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research, Montreal, QC H2V 2J2, Canada.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2019 Feb 19;116(8):3310-3315. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1809855116. Epub 2019 Feb 6.
Enjoying music reliably ranks among life's greatest pleasures. Like many hedonic experiences, it engages several reward-related brain areas, with activity in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) most consistently reflecting the listener's subjective response. Converging evidence suggests that this activity arises from musical "reward prediction errors" (RPEs) that signal the difference between expected and perceived musical events, but this hypothesis has not been directly tested. In the present fMRI experiment, we assessed whether music could elicit formally modeled RPEs in the NAc by applying a well-established decision-making protocol designed and validated for studying RPEs. In the scanner, participants chose between arbitrary cues that probabilistically led to dissonant or consonant music, and learned to make choices associated with the consonance, which they preferred. We modeled regressors of trial-by-trial RPEs, finding that NAc activity tracked musically elicited RPEs, to an extent that explained variance in the individual learning rates. These results demonstrate that music can act as a reward, driving learning and eliciting RPEs in the NAc, a hub of reward- and music enjoyment-related activity.
欣赏音乐无疑是人生最大乐趣之一。和许多带来愉悦的体验一样，它涉及到几个与奖励相关的大脑区域，其中伏隔核（NAc）的活动最能反映出聆听者的主观反应。越来越多的证据表明，这种活动源于音乐的“奖励预测误差”（RPEs），它反映了预期和感知到的音乐事件之间的差异，但这一假设尚未得到直接验证。在本 fMRI 实验中，我们通过应用一种经过充分验证的决策制定协议来评估音乐是否能在 NAc 中引起经过正式建模的 RPEs，该协议旨在研究 RPEs。在扫描仪中，参与者在任意线索之间做出选择，这些线索有概率导致不和谐或和谐的音乐，然后学习做出与和谐相关的选择，他们更喜欢这种选择。我们对每个试次的 RPE 进行了回归分析，发现 NAc 的活动追踪到了由音乐引起的 RPE，其程度可以解释个体学习率的差异。这些结果表明，音乐可以作为一种奖励，驱动学习并在 NAc 中引起 RPE，而 NAc 是奖励和音乐享受相关活动的枢纽。
