Lauren Fink (UCDavis) on modeling pupillary entrainment to music and absorptive music listening experiences
What can our eyes tell us about how we hear music? Lauren Fink from UC Davis will talk about how the pupils of our eyes respond to music. Her work shows that the pupil diameter reflects the musical rhythm and whether we are engaged with the music. This is cool, not only because it shows our eyes "listen" to music, but also ties into recent work investigating the connection between auditory salience and eye responses. The eyes have it!
Abstract
The locus coeruleus noradrenergic (LC-NA) system plays a critical role in sensory processing, attentional regulation, and memory consolidation. Because changes in pupil diameter reflect sub-second changes in attentional state related to LC-NA functioning, the pupil may provide novel insights about musical processing on a fine temporal scale. In this talk I will discuss findings from two pupillometry studies. In the first study (Fink, Hurley, Geng, & Janata, 2018), we assessed the potential of a stimulus-driven linear oscillator model (Tomic & Janata, 2008) to predict dynamic attention to musical rhythms on an instant-by-instant basis. We used perceptual thresholds and pupillometry as attentional indices against which to test our model predictions. We show that the pupil dilates to changes in loudness, even when participants do not report hearing them, with the magnitude of dilation being a significant predictor of participants’ response. Besides the evoked pupillary response to loudness deviants, we also assessed the continuous pupillary signal to the rhythmic patterns. The pupil exhibited entrainment at prominent periodicities present in the stimuli and followed each of the different rhythmic patterns in a unique way, predicted by our model. To our knowledge, this is the first study to show entrainment of pupil dynamics by demonstrating a phase relationship between musical stimuli and the pupillary signal. In a second study (Fink, Lange, & Janata, in prep), we asked whether the coherence between the pupillary and musical signals can predict participants’ feeling of being absorbed in music. Participants listened to 60 sec instrumental excerpts from a range of genres and moods, while being eye-tracked, and rated their experience on a variety of dimensions. Again, we found that peak frequencies from the linear oscillator model predicted peaks in the pupil spectrum of listeners, on a single subject level. Critically, the pupil spectrum for 60 sec silent trials showed no spectral peaks. Ratings of absorption but not liking, familiarity, valence, or arousal, were predicted by pupil-music coherence. The pupil tended to oscillate at a frequency a few subharmonics below that of the beat, even though oscillating at the beat frequency would not be outside of the physiological limits of oscillatory pupil activity, suggesting attentional fluctuations at the bar or phrase level of the music.
Lauren Fink is a Neuroscience PhD candidate in the lab of Dr. Petr Janata at the University of California, Davis. Lauren received a BM in percussion performance in 2013, from the University of Cincinnati College–Conservatory of Music, where she studied with Allen Otte of the Percussion Group Cincinnati and an M.Phil in Music Studies from the University of Cambridge, where she was supervised by Dr. Ian Cross. Recently, Lauren was a visiting researcher at the Max-Planck-Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, where she was the scientific co-chair of a Conference on Music and Eye-Tracking. She is currently guest-editing a forthcoming Special Issue on the same topic for the Journal of Eye Movement Research. In addition to her research, Lauren leads a neuroscience diversity initiative: SOMA: Seminar Outreach for Minority Advocacy. She also volunteers with non-profit organization Girls Rock Sacramento and serves on the peer review panel of the California Arts Council.