Social Cognition & Music
Tommi Himberg - ISSSCCM 2009

"The endeavor to live in a shared,
peaceful agreement with others
is an extension of the endeavor
to preserve oneself.
- B. Spinoza (Damasio 2003)

“Human beings, and only human
beings, are biologically adapted for
participating in collaborative
activities involving shared goals and
socially coordinated action plans.”
- M. Tomasello et al. 2005

Outline
music <=> social <=> cognition
features & mechanisms
development and learning
empathy and emotions
attention and shared intentions
entrainment
research applications

What is music for?
This video in YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9SNrL8RHEA

Motivation and definition
music as social activity - unique tool to investigate
interpersonal interaction
sociality essential aspect of music-making
human evolution - we are a hypersocial species
emotion control, bonding, communication
isn’t all cognition social/individual?
cognitive processes and mechanisms that facilitate social
interaction

Development & learning
earliest interaction and communication (infant-directed
speech) has many musical features (Trehub, Trainor, Trevarthen...)
lullabies - musical universal
emotion regulation
language learning “gated” by social interaction? (Kuhl 2008)
segmentation, attention to important aspects of the information
influx
social learning = culture?

Perception & attention
priority of processing social information - faces, names
embodiment and mirror neuron systems
directing attention is a social process - gaze following
attention entrained to the rhythms of the environment
dynamic attention - Large & Jones 1999
dividing attention between monitoring own
performance, that of partners and the emergent pattern
(Keller 1999, Sawyer 2005, Benzon 2002)

Shared intentionality

Shared intentionality
intention reading (theory of mind)
cultural learning
motivation for sharing psychological states
shared representations - abstracting a beat
together, metrical hierarchy etc.

Entrainment
a process by which two independent but coupled
oscillators converge in period and phase
not unique to humans - inanimate objects “can” do it
unique ability for auditory-motor synchronisation to
external referent
extreme from of prediction/expectation?
we know how we synchronise (see Repp 2005), the
interesting question is what it “means” to us

Entrainment as bonding
many theories of adaptive role of music in evolution focus
on its capabilities to facilitate social interaction and group
bonding
larger groups have better chances of survival
individual needs certain skills to be able to be a part of the group
these skills are genetically transmitted and selected for in evolution
emotional reward for being “together”
increased affiliation after successful synchronisation (Hove
2008)

Entrainment - expectations?
Meyer (1956): music sets up expectations - they are
met, delayed or denied -> emotional response
musical structures and reading minds -> predictability
entrainment -> extreme prediction!
but, it’s the errors that count! And, how they are
corrected...
collaborative error correction (Vorberg 2005, Repp & Keller 2008)
is it an “error” or a piece of socially relevant
information?

Errare humanum est
4
3
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1
0
1
2
3
4

Entrainment & communication
conversation - unintentional entrainment (Richardson et al.
2007, Shockley et al. 2003)
sign of agreement, conclusion (Gill 2008)
successful therapeutic intervention for dyslexia (Overy 2003)
musical communication

Summary
humans are a “hypersocial” species
social emotion-regulation (aggression attenuation etc.)
communication, social learning, culture
motivation to share psychological states
music relies on many cognitive systems that underlie
this “sociality”, including some that are species-specific
--> when the hypersocial species gets on a super-
social mode, it does music
interpersonal entrainment is an example of a neural -
cognitive - emotional - social process necessary for
music and other forms of communication.

Research implications
definition of a “cognitive system” - study “cognition in
the wild” (Hutchins 1995)
focus on interaction - mutual influence, emergence...
comparative perspectives - the whole range of
functions that music has, the whole range of systems
and processes that subserve it

Thank you!
tommi.himberg@jyu.fi
http://www.twitter.com/tijh
http://www.facebook.com/himberg
http://mindsync.wordpress.com