Zheng Mingjian, Lin Han, Chen Fei
Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2020 Jul;2020:3200-3203. doi: 10.1109/EMBC44109.2020.9176441.
Music is a medium for people to convey and express information, and different music styles show distinct effects on the emotion and cognitive activities of human brain. The construal level denotes the abstract level of the representation of objects, and as a useful indicator has been widely used to measure people's cognitive activities. Meanwhile, the neurophysiological responses in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) are associated with human cognitive activities. This work investigated the influence of music style on cognitive activities by measuring the construal level and PFC activation level. Two music styles (i.e., soothing and uplifting) were presented to listeners in the experiments. A behavioral experiment measured listeners' subjective construal levels, while the PFC activation levels were measured by a functional near-infrared spectroscopy. Results showed that compared with uplifting music, soothing music increased the subjective construal level; and the PFC activation level was higher in uplifting music than that in soothing music. These findings suggested that different music styles had distinct effects on the construal level and PFC activation level, providing evidences that music styles could impact people's cognitive activities.
音乐是人们传达和表达信息的一种媒介，不同的音乐风格对人类大脑的情感和认知活动有着不同的影响。解释水平表示对物体表征的抽象程度，作为一个有用的指标已被广泛用于衡量人们的认知活动。同时，前额叶皮层（PFC）的神经生理反应与人类认知活动相关。这项工作通过测量解释水平和PFC激活水平来研究音乐风格对认知活动的影响。实验中向听众呈现了两种音乐风格（即舒缓型和振奋型）。一项行为实验测量了听众的主观解释水平，而PFC激活水平则通过功能近红外光谱法进行测量。结果表明，与振奋型音乐相比，舒缓型音乐提高了主观解释水平；振奋型音乐中的PFC激活水平高于舒缓型音乐。这些发现表明，不同的音乐风格对解释水平和PFC激活水平有不同的影响，为音乐风格能够影响人们的认知活动提供了证据。
