This paper examines the role of mental imagery in music performance. Self‐reports by musicians, and various other sources of anecdotal evidence, suggest that covert auditory, motor, and/or visual ...imagery facilitate multiple aspects of music performance. The cognitive and motor mechanisms that underlie such imagery include working memory, action simulation, and internal models. Together these mechanisms support the generation of anticipatory images that enable thorough action planning and movement execution that is characterized by efficiency, temporal precision, and biomechanical economy. In ensemble performance, anticipatory imagery may facilitate interpersonal coordination by enhancing online predictions about others’ action timing. Overlap in brain regions subserving auditory imagery and temporal prediction is consistent with this view. It is concluded that individual differences in anticipatory imagery may be a source of variation in expressive performance excellence and the quality of ensemble cohesion. Engaging in effortful musical imagery is therefore justified when artistic perfection is the goal.
Human interaction often requires simultaneous precision and flexibility in the coordination of rhythmic behaviour between individuals engaged in joint activity, for example, playing a musical duet or ...dancing with a partner. This review article addresses the psychological processes and brain mechanisms that enable such rhythmic interpersonal coordination. First, an overview is given of research on the cognitive-motor processes that enable individuals to represent joint action goals and to anticipate, attend and adapt to other's actions in real time. Second, the neurophysiological mechanisms that underpin rhythmic interpersonal coordination are sought in studies of sensorimotor and cognitive processes that play a role in the representation and integration of self- and other-related actions within and between individuals' brains. Finally, relationships between social–psychological factors and rhythmic interpersonal coordination are considered from two perspectives, one concerning how social-cognitive tendencies (e.g. empathy) affect coordination, and the other concerning how coordination affects interpersonal affiliation, trust and prosocial behaviour. Our review highlights musical ensemble performance as an ecologically valid yet readily controlled domain for investigating rhythm in joint action.
The current study aims at characterizing the mechanisms that allow humans to entrain the mind and body to incoming rhythmic sensory inputs in real time. We addressed this unresolved issue by ...examining the relationship between covert neural processes and overt behavior in the context of musical rhythm. We measured temporal prediction abilities, sensorimotor synchronization accuracy and neural entrainment to auditory rhythms as captured using an EEG frequency-tagging approach. Importantly, movement synchronization accuracy with a rhythmic beat could be explained by the amplitude of neural activity selectively locked with the beat period when listening to the rhythmic inputs. Furthermore, stronger endogenous neural entrainment at the beat frequency was associated with superior temporal prediction abilities. Together, these results reveal a direct link between cortical and behavioral measures of rhythmic entrainment, thus providing evidence that frequency-tagged brain activity has functional relevance for beat perception and synchronization.
(
) infection is highly prevalent in the human population and may lead to severe gastrointestinal pathology including gastric and duodenal ulcers, mucosa associated tissue lymphoma and gastric ...adenocarcinoma. In recent years, an alarming increase in antimicrobial resistance and subsequently failing empiric
eradication therapies have been noted worldwide, also in many European countries. Therefore, rapid and accurate determination of
's antibiotic susceptibility prior to the administration of eradication regimens becomes ever more important. Traditionally, detection of
and its antimicrobial resistance is done by culture and phenotypic drug susceptibility testing that are cumbersome with a long turn-around-time. Recent advances in diagnostics provide new tools, like real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and line probe assays, to diagnose
infection and antimicrobial resistance to certain antibiotics, directly from clinical specimens. Moreover, high-throughput whole genome sequencing technologies allow the rapid analysis of the pathogen's genome, thereby allowing identification of resistance mutations and associated antibiotic resistance. In the first part of this review, we will give an overview on currently available diagnostic methods for detection of
and its drug resistance and their implementation in
management. The second part of the review focusses on the use of next generation sequencing technology in
research. To this end, we conducted a literature search for original research articles in English using the terms "
", "transcriptomic", "transcriptome", "next generation sequencing" and "whole genome sequencing". This review is aimed to bridge the gap between current diagnostic practice (histology, rapid urease test,
culture, PCR and line probe assays) and new sequencing technologies and their potential implementation in diagnostic laboratory settings in order to complement the currently recommended
management guidelines and subsequently improve public health.
Shared knowledge and interpersonal coordination are prerequisites for most forms of social behavior. Influential approaches to joint action have conceptualized these capacities in relation to the ...separate constructs of co-representation (knowledge) and self-other entrainment (coordination). Here we investigated how brain mechanisms involved in co-representation and entrainment interact to support joint action. To do so, we used a musical joint action paradigm to show that the neural mechanisms underlying co-representation and self-other entrainment are linked via a process – indexed by EEG alpha oscillations – regulating the balance between self-other integration and segregation in real time. Pairs of pianists performed short musical items while action familiarity and interpersonal (behavioral) synchronization accuracy were manipulated in a factorial design. Action familiarity referred to whether or not pianists had rehearsed the musical material performed by the other beforehand. Interpersonal synchronization was manipulated via congruent or incongruent tempo change instructions that biased performance timing towards the impending, new tempo. It was observed that, when pianists were familiar with each other's parts, millisecond variations in interpersonal synchronized behavior were associated with a modulation of alpha power over right centro-parietal scalp regions. Specifically, high behavioral entrainment was associated with self-other integration, as indexed by alpha suppression. Conversely, low behavioral entrainment encouraged reliance on internal knowledge and thus led to self-other segregation, indexed by alpha enhancement. These findings suggest that alpha oscillations index the processing of information about self and other depending on the compatibility of internal knowledge and external (environmental) events at finely resolved timescales.
•The neurophysiological basis of self-other integration was examined in piano duos.•EEG alpha power is sensitive to millisecond-scale changes in self-other entrainment.•Other's familiar and highly entrained actions suppress right centro-parietal alpha.•Alpha oscillations balance internal and external information in social interaction.
Music makes us move, and using bass instruments to build the rhythmic foundations of music is especially effective at inducing people to dance to periodic pulse-like beats. Here, we show that this ...culturally widespread practice may exploit a neurophysiological mechanism whereby low-frequency sounds shape the neural representations of rhythmic input by boosting selective locking to the beat. Cortical activity was captured using electroencephalography (EEG) while participants listened to a regular rhythm or to a relatively complex syncopated rhythm conveyed either by low tones (130 Hz) or high tones (1236.8 Hz). We found that cortical activity at the frequency of the perceived beat is selectively enhanced compared with other frequencies in the EEG spectrum when rhythms are conveyed by bass sounds. This effect is unlikely to arise from early cochlear processes, as revealed by auditory physiological modeling, and was particularly pronounced for the complex rhythm requiring endogenous generation of the beat. The effect is likewise not attributable to differences in perceived loudness between low and high tones, as a control experiment manipulating sound intensity alone did not yield similar results. Finally, the privileged role of bass sounds is contingent on allocation of attentional resources to the temporal properties of the stimulus, as revealed by a further control experiment examining the role of a behavioral task. Together, our results provide a neurobiological basis for the convention of using bass instruments to carry the rhythmic foundations of music and to drive people to move to the beat.
Humans are innately social creatures, but cognitive neuroscience, that has traditionally focused on individual brains, is only now beginning to investigate social cognition through realistic ...interpersonal interaction. Music provides an ideal domain for doing so because it offers a promising solution for balancing the trade-off between ecological validity and experimental control when testing cognitive and brain functions. Musical ensembles constitute a microcosm that provides a platform for parametrically modeling the complexity of human social interaction.
Coordinated behavior promotes collaboration among humans. To shed light upon this relationship, we investigated whether and how interpersonal coordination is promoted by empathic perspective taking ...(EPT). In a joint music-making task, pairs of participants rotated electronic music-boxes, producing two streams of musical sounds that were meant to be played synchronously. Participants - who were not musically trained - were assigned to high and low EPT groups based on pre-experimental assessments using a standardized personality questionnaire. Results indicated that high EPT pairs were generally more accurate in synchronizing their actions. When instructed to lead the interaction, high and low EPT leaders were equally cooperative with followers, making their performance tempo more regular, presumably in order to increase their predictability and help followers to synchronize. Crucially, however, high EPT followers were better able to use this information to predict leaders' behavior and thus improve interpersonal synchronization. Thus, empathic perspective taking promotes interpersonal coordination by enhancing accuracy in predicting others' behavior while leaving the aptitude for cooperation unaltered. We argue that such predictive capacity relies on a sensorimotor mechanism responsible for simulating others' actions in an anticipatory manner, leading to behavioral advantages that may impact social cognition on a broad scale.
is a major human pathogen. Diagnosis of
infection and determination of its antibiotic susceptibility still mainly rely on culture and phenotypic drug susceptibility testing (DST) that is ...time-consuming and laborious. Whole genome sequencing (WGS) has recently emerged in medical microbiology as a diagnostic tool for reliable drug resistance prediction in bacterial pathogens. The aim of this study was to compare phenotypic DST results with the predictions based on the presence of genetic determinants identified in the
genome using WGS. Phenotypic resistance to clarithromycin, metronidazole, tetracycline, levofloxacin, and rifampicin was determined in 140 clinical
isolates by E-Test
, and the occurrence of certain single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in target genes was determined by WGS. Overall, there was a high congruence of >99% between phenotypic DST results for clarithromycin, levofloxacin, and rifampicin and SNPs identified in the 23S rRNA,
, and
gene. However, it was not possible to infer a resistance phenotype for metronidazole based on the occurrence of distinct SNPs in
and
. All 140
isolates analysed in this study were susceptible to tetracycline, which was in accordance with the absence of double or triple nucleotide substitutions in the 16S rRNA gene.
PDF
