Biological psychology
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Biological psychology · Sep 2009
Breathing frequency bias in fractal analysis of heart rate variability.
Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) is an algorithm widely used to determine fractal long-range correlations in physiological signals. Its application to heart rate variability (HRV) has proven useful in distinguishing healthy subjects from patients with cardiovascular disease. ⋯ Results revealed that: (1) the periodical properties of RSA produce a change of the correlation exponent in HRV at a scale corresponding to the respiratory period, (2) the short-term DFA exponent is significantly reduced when breathing frequency rises from 0.1Hz to 0.2Hz. These findings raise important methodological questions regarding the application of fractal measures to short-term HRV.
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Biological psychology · Sep 2009
Non-musicians' perception of phrase boundaries in music: A cross-cultural ERP study.
The present study investigates neural responses to musical phrase boundaries in subjects without formal musical training, with special emphasis on the issue of cultural familiarity (i.e., the relation between the enculturation of the subjects and the cultural style of the presented music). German and Chinese non-musicians listened to Western and Chinese melodies which contained manipulated phrase boundaries while event-related potentials (ERP) were measured. The behavioral data clearly showed that melodic phrase boundary perception is influenced by cultural familiarity. ⋯ In contrast, cultural familiarity only influenced phrase boundary processing at longer latencies, reflected by a P3-like component peaking at 280ms. At about 450-600ms post phrase boundary offset, we observed a slightly right-lateralized music closure positive shift (CPS), which has been reported as a marker for phrase boundary processing in musicians in earlier studies. This study demonstrates for the first time that the music CPS can be elicited in non-musicians, suggesting that the underlying phrase boundary processing does not require formal musical training.