Many current neurophysiological, psychophysical, and psychological approaches to vision rest on the idea that when we see, the brain produces an internal representation of the world. The activation of this internal representation is assumed to give rise to the experience of seeing. The problem with this kind of approach is that it leaves unexplained how the existence of such a detailed internal representation might produce visual consciousness. An alternative proposal is made here. We propose that seeing is a way of acting. It is a particular way of exploring the environment. Activity in internal representations does not generate the experience of seeing. The outside world serves as its own, external, representation. The experience of seeing occurs when the organism masters what we call the governing laws of sensorimotor contingency. The advantage of this approach is that it provides a natural and principled way of accounting for visual consciousness, and for the differences in the perceived quality of sensory experience in the different sensory modalities. Several lines of empirical evidence are brought forward in support of the theory, in particular: evidence from experiments in sensorimotor adaptation, visual \"filling in,\" visual stability despite eye movements, change blindness, sensory substitution, and color perception.

A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness-Authors' Response-Acting out our sensory experience

Plan nacional de desarrollo

"The Social and Applied Psychology of Music" by Adrian North & David Hargreaves "The Social and Applied Psychology of Music", by Adrian North & David Hargreaves. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. (ISBN 978-0-19-856742-4, Paperback, 476pp., $69.95). In this book by North and Hargreaves, a quick glance at the contents reveals that the applied science of music psychology is more than the application of psychological theories and principles to address real world problems. It is a way of making a real difference in our lives. It is also a way of raising awareness of the significance of music for bettering the human condition in the hope of safeguarding it from the "moral, financial, and technological pressures" of the modern world. Throughout their systematic and well-constructed overview, the authors remind us that responsible ethics and humane values must be at the forefront of any social and applied psychology research agenda if music is to be recognized and appreciated as a "manifestation of the human spirit". There are seven chapters, and the topics cover theoretical and empirical explorations of music in relation to creativity, composition and musicianship; preferences and taste; manipulation and subcultures; industry, business and health; development and education. North and Hargreaves tell us that Doise's (1986) concept of "levels of analysis" was an important influence on their own research and on the way they have defined the social psychology of music according to intraindividual, interindividual/situational, socio-positional, and ideological. The authors also adopted a topicbased approach to the book "in the hope that, by juxtaposing related bodies of research that are largely uninformed by one another, researchers will be more inclined to draw on related work and increase the coherence of the field" (p. 5). Donaldson, Berger, and Pezdek (2006) remind us that in addition to up-to-date theory and research-based applications of psychology, a volume devoted to applied psychology can be used to inform researchers and practitioners alike about the varied and wide-ranging opportunities that exist for addressing education, health, social, legal, and economic problems. The volume by North and Hargreaves is an important reminder of the tremendous growth of research in the social psychology of music that has taken place since Farnsworth (1969) published his second edition on this topic. There has been a paradigm shift in music psychology in general towards a focus on social factors and contexts. Hargreaves and North's (1997) edited publication on the social psychology of music marked a noticeable increase in studies that examined "the purpose and implications of musical behavior in naturalistic contexts" (p. 9). Their latest book goes even further in dispelling the seemingly false dichotomy between basic and applied research in music psychology and between music psychology and other related fields such as sociology, anthropology, education, economics, cultural, media and communication studies. One of the high points in the book for me, and perhaps one of the most provocative topics of investigation in applied psychology of music today, relates to musical tastes and preferences, the reasons we like or dislike certain styles or forms of music, and the impact music has on people in their everyday lives. This is an area where North and Hargreaves have made some of their most prolific and seminal research contributions. For nearly two decades, they have investigated musical tastes and preferences across a variety of ages and social contexts in an attempt to unravel the great mystery of how musical elements and sociocultural factors are related to our sense of musical valuing. They provide a detailed theoretical and experimental background for future researchers to build on and give many clues about how we might best proceed in finding answers to important overarching questions. I believe that these questions should include: How does music make a significant contribution to our lives? …

The Social and Applied Psychology of Music

The phenomenon of creativity has received a growing amount of attention from scholars working across a range of disciplines. While this research has produced many important insights, it has also traditionally tended to explore creativity in terms of the reception of products or outcomes, conceiving of it as a cognitive process that is limited to the individual domain of the creative agent. More recently, however, researchers have begun to develop perspectives on creativity that highlight the patterns of adaptive embodied interaction that occur between multiple agents, as well as the broader socio-material milieu they are situated in. This has promoted new understandings of creativity, which is now often considered as a distributed phenomenon. Because music involves such a wide range of socio-cultural, bodily, technological, and temporal dimensions it is increasingly taken as a paradigmatic example for researchers who wish to explore creativity from this more relational perspective. In this article, we aim to contribute to this project by discussing musical creativity in light of recent developments in embodied cognitive science. More specifically, we will attempt to frame an approach to musical creativity based in an 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) understanding of cognition. We suggest that this approach may help us better understand creativity in terms of how interacting individuals and social groups bring forth worlds of meaning through shared, embodied processes of dynamic interactivity. We also explore how dynamical systems theory (DST) may offer useful tools for research and theory that align closely with the 4E perspective. To conclude, we summarize our discussion and suggest possibilities for future research.

Musical creativity and the embodied mind

Despite evolutionary musicology’s interdisciplinary nature, and the diverse methods it employs, the field has nevertheless tended to divide into two main positions. Some argue that music should be understood as a naturally selected adaptation, while others claim that music is a product of culture with little or no relevance for the survival of the species. We review these arguments, suggesting that while interesting and well-reasoned positions have been offered on both sides of the debate, the nature-or-culture (or adaptation vs. non-adaptation) assumptions that have traditionally driven the discussion have resulted in a problematic either/or dichotomy. We then consider an alternative ‘biocultural’ proposal that appears to offer a way forward. As we discuss, this approach draws on a range of research in theoretical biology, archeology, neuroscience, embodied and ecological cognition, and dynamical systems theory, positing a more integrated model that sees biological and cultural dimensions as aspects of the same evolving system. Following this, we outline the enactive approach to cognition, discussing the ways it aligns with the biocultural perspective. Put simply, the enactive approach posits a deep continuity between mind and life, where cognitive processes are explored in terms of how self-organizing living systems enact relationships with the environment that are relevant to their survival and well-being. It highlights the embodied and ecologically situated nature of living agents, as well as the active role they play in their own developmental processes. Importantly, the enactive approach sees cognitive and evolutionary processes as driven by a range of interacting factors, including the socio-cultural forms of activity that characterize the lives of more complex creatures such as ourselves. We offer some suggestions for how this approach might enhance and extend the biocultural model. To conclude we briefly consider the implications of this approach for practical areas such as music education.

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Evolutionary Musicology Meets Embodied Cognition: Biocultural Coevolution and the Enactive Origins of Human Musicality

Basic Emotion theory has had a tremendous influence on the affective sciences, including music psychology, where most researchers have assumed that music expressivity is constrained to a limited set of basic emotions Several scholars suggested that these constrains to musical expressivity are explained by the existence of a shared acoustic code to the expression of emotions in music and speech prosody In this article we advocate for a shift from this focus on basic emotions to a constructionist account This approach proposes that the phenomenon of perception of emotions in music arises from the interaction of music’s ability to express core affects and the influence of top-down and contextual information in the listener’s mind We start by reviewing the problems with the concept of Basic Emotions, and the inconsistent evidence that supports it We also demonstrate how decades of developmental and cross-cultural research on music and emotional speech have failed to produce convincing findings to conclude that music expressivity is built upon a set of biologically pre-determined basic emotions We then examine the cue-emotion consistencies between music and speech, and show how they support a parsimonious explanation, where musical expressivity is grounded on two dimensions of core affect (arousal and valence) Next, we explain how the fact that listeners reliably identify basic emotions in music does not arise from the existence of categorical boundaries in the stimuli, but from processes that facilitate categorical perception, such as using stereotyped stimuli and close-ended response formats, psychological processes of construction of mental prototypes, and contextual information Finally, we outline our proposal of a constructionist account of perception of emotions in music, and spell out the ways in which this approach is able to make solve past conflicting findings We conclude by providing explicit pointers about the methodological choices that will be vital to move beyond the popular Basic Emotion paradigm and start untangling the emergence of emotional experiences with music in the actual contexts in which they occur

/pdf/music-communicates-affects-not-basic-emotions-a-4nic4pd9xr.pdf

Music Communicates Affects, Not Basic Emotions - A Constructionist Account of Attribution of Emotional Meanings to Music.

The subject of musical emotions has emerged only recently as a major area of research. While much work in this area offers fascinating insights to musicological research, assumptions about the nature of emotional experience seem to remain committed to appraisal, representations, and a rule-based or information-processing model of cognition. Over the past three decades alternative ‘embodied’ and ‘enactive’ models of mind have challenged this approach by emphasising the self-organising aspects of cognition, often describing it as an ongoing process of dynamic interactivity between an organism and its environment. More recently, this perspective has been applied to the study of emotion in general, opening up interesting new possibilities for theory and research. This new approach, however, has received rather limited attention in musical contexts. With this in mind, we critically review the history of music and emotion studies, arguing that many existing theories offer only limited views of what musical-emotional experience entails. We then attempt to provide preliminary grounding for an alternative perspective on music and emotion based on the enactive/dynamic systems approach to the study of mind.

Enacting musical emotions. sense-making, dynamic systems, and the embodied mind

This article reports a two-part study into the prosocial impacts of third sector cultural activities with children and adolescents in impoverished and violence-stricken urban neighbourhoods in Cali...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/10298649211013505

Promoting prosociality in Colombia: Is music more effective than other cultural interventions?

Emotional contagion has been explained as arising from embodied simulation. The two most accepted theories of music-induced emotions presume a mechanism of internal mimicry: the BRECVEMA framework proposes that the melodic aspect of music elicits internal mimicry leading to the induction of basic emotions in the listener, and the Multifactorial Process Model proposes that the observation or imagination of motor expressions of the musicians elicits muscular and neural mimicry, and emotional contagion. Two behavioral studies investigated whether, and to what extent, mimicry is responsible for emotion contagion, and second, to what extent context for affective responses in the form of visual imagery moderates emotional responses. Experiment 1 tested whether emotional contagion is influenced by mimicry by manipulating explicit vocal and motor mimicry. In one condition, participants engaged in mimicry of the melodic aspects of the music by singing along with the music, and in another, participants engaged in mimicry of the musician’s gestures when producing the music, by playing along (“air guitar”-style). The experiment did not find confirmatory evidence for either hypothesized simulation mechanism, but it did provide evidence of spontaneous visual imagery consistent with the induced and perceived emotions. Experiment 2 used imagined rather than performed mimicry, but found no association between imagined motor simulation and emotional intensity. Emotional descriptions read prior to hearing the music influenced the type of perceived and induced emotions and support the prediction that visual imagery and associated semantic knowledge shape listeners’ affective experiences with music. The lack of evidence for the causal role of embodied simulation suggests that current theorization of emotion contagion by music needs refinement to reduce the role of simulation relative to other mechanisms. Evidence for induction of affective states that can be modulated by contextual and semantic associations suggests a model of emotion induction consistent with constructionist accounts.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/20592043221093836

The Role of Embodied Simulation and Visual Imagery in Emotional Contagion with Music

The effect of moving along to music on induced affect was investigated by asking two groups of participants ( N = 76) to listen to rhythmic patterns while either foot tapping along to the beat or staying still, respectively. Stimuli consisted of drum-breaks with three levels of syncopation (low, intermediate, high). Participants reported levels of induced pleasantness, relaxation, and wakefulness. It was hypothesized that participants who tapped along would experience greater pleasantness, less relaxation, and more wakefulness than those who remained still. In addition, it was predicted that stimuli with intermediate syncopation would be associated with greater pleasantness, following an inverted U-shaped function, and that increasing levels of syncopation would be associated with decreased relaxation and increased wakefulness. Results showed no differences in affective state between participants who tapped along and participants who stayed still. While the predicted associations between syncopation, pleasantness, and relaxation were only partially supported by the data, we did find an inverted U-shaped relationship between syncopation and difficulty to tap along, or stay still. The findings suggest that moving along to music does not automatically lead to more intense affective responses, potentially because any positive change associated with movement is outweighed by the difficulty of the synchronization task.

Julian Cespedes-Guevara

Papers

Music Communicates Affects, Not Basic Emotions - A Constructionist Account of Attribution of Emotional Meanings to Music.

Enacting musical emotions. sense-making, dynamic systems, and the embodied mind

Promoting prosociality in Colombia: Is music more effective than other cultural interventions?

The Role of Embodied Simulation and Visual Imagery in Emotional Contagion with Music

Syncopation levels, but not movement, are associated with pleasantness while listening to rhythmic music