Biology subjects

Timmerman, R. H.

Publications and source records attributed to Timmerman, R. H..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Top-down influences on neural music processing: preference, enjoyment and familiarity influence neural tracking and brain rhythms differently

Music enjoyment and familiarity are closely related but often confounded in studies of neural music processing. Here, we investigated their distinct contributions to cortical oscillatory activity and neural tracking of music using electroencephalography (EEG). Thirty-two participants listened to self-selected all-time favourite songs, recent favourite songs, and tempo-matched songs from disliked genres. This novel paradigm dissociated familiarity from enjoyment by including highly enjoyed songs that differed in familiarity. Spectral power and cortical tracking (using Mutual Information) were analysed using linear mixed-effects models with enjoyment and familiarity ratings. Familiarity was associated with increased left-frontal alpha power, whereas enjoyment predicted increased theta and beta power, demonstrating distinct oscillatory signatures for these dimensions. An interaction revealed that the positive relationship between enjoyment and theta power was strongest for highly familiar music. Cortical tracking analyses showed that greater enjoyment was associated with reduced delta-band tracking, with a significant interaction indicating that this negative relationship was present for highly familiar songs but not for less familiar songs. These findings indicate that enjoyment and familiarity differentially shape neural responses to music and highlight the importance of modelling both factors to disentangle their distinct effects on neural activity during music listening.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2026

Pupil- and gaze dynamics track emotion content in natural speech

Cortical tracking of speech features is a well-established marker of continuous speech processing, but far less is known about listeners ocular responses to speech rhythm. Ocular responses are central to active sensing models in the auditory domain, where motor recruitment guides temporal speech prediction and attention allocation, potentially shaped by non-rhythmic cues, such as emotions. Here, we ask whether listeners pupil response and eye movements track the acoustic speech signals and to what extent this tracking is modulated by emotion-related top-down factors, including subjective emotion ratings, mood, and trait empathy. In a validation study (N = 100), participants passively listened to two TED talks and intermittently rated segments on valence (negative-positive) and arousal (low-high). This suggested substantial variability in valence and arousal across speech segments in both talks. In the second study (N = 41), participants completed the same task while pupillometry and electrooculography (EOG) were recorded. Mutual information was used to quantify speech tracking in pupil dilation, along with horizontal and vertical eye movements. All ocular signals significantly tracked speech at low frequencies. High-arousal speech was associated with stronger pupil tracking but weaker vertical and horizontal EOG tracking. Negative speech valence was linked to stronger tracking in pupil and vertical eye-movement signals. Interactions between the speech-emotion dimensions, as well as their interactions with listeners mood, further shaped these effects, giving rise to distinct patterns across ocular measures. Taken together, our findings provide evidence that ocular activity dynamically aligns to the temporal structure of natural speech and that this tracking is sensitive to both stimulus-driven and listener-dependent emotional factors.

physiology↗

bioRxiv2020

Exploring the interaction between the pupillary light response after exogenous attentional cueing and detection performance

Pupil size changes under different light conditions. Whereas this pupillary light response (PLR) has long been regarded to be influenced by luminance only, recent studies indicated the PLR is also modulated by cognitive factors such as the allocation of spatial attention. This attentional modulation of the PLR has previously been hypothesized to facilitate detection and discrimination of visual information. Here, we replicated the finding that the pupil dilates when a cue is presented at the dark side of a screen and constricts when the cue is presented at the bright side, even when the eyes are fixated at the center. Furthermore, we investigated whether this modulation of the PLR, evoked by exogenous shifts of covert attention, facilitates perception operationalized as detection performance for threshold stimuli. Results showed that a larger pupil was indeed related to increased detection performance, although this effect was restricted to conditions in which both cue and target appeared on a dark surface. Our findings are in line with the notion that pupil dilations improve detectability, whereas pupil constrictions enhance discriminability of small stimuli.

neuroscience↗