Your brain and ‘humanoid’ robots
p2pnet news view | Cool Stuff:- Neural mechanisms of music-syntactic processing operate independently of the emotional qualities of a stimulus, justifying the use of stimuli without emotional expression to investigate the cognitive processing of musical structure.
Not only but also, “the data indicate that musical expression affects the neural mechanisms underlying the processing of musical meaning. Our data are the first to reveal influences of musical performance on ERPs and SCRs, and to show physiological responses to unexpected chords in naturalistic music.”
Er, um, Yes, well……
Or as Maria José Viñas wraps it up in the Chronicle for Higher Education’s Wired Campus >>>
Playing with human-like machines activates areas of the brain related to the attribution of intentions and desires to others, a team of German researchers reports in a study published today in the journal PLoS ONE.
To study how people perceive humanoid machines and attribute mental qualities to them, a team led by Sören Krach from the RWTH Aachen University, in Germany, observed the brain activity of a group of 20 subjects while they played a computer game against increasingly human-like machines – a regular computer notebook, a Lego-robot and a humanoid robot – and finally, against another person.
The results showed that neural activity in two areas of the brain related to mental attribution increased in parallel to how closely the gaming partner resembled a person.
The subjects also reported they enjoyed the game most when their opponent looked most like humans—and they thought those gaming partners were the most intelligent, too.
This study investigates event-related brain potentials (ERPs), skin conductance responses (SCRs) and heart rate (HR) elicited by unexpected chords of piano sonatas as they were originally arranged by composers, and as they were played by professional pianists.
From the musical excerpts played by the pianists (with emotional expression), we also created versions without variations in tempo and loudness (without musical expression) to investigate effects of musical expression on ERPs and SCRs. Compared to expected chords, unexpected chords elicited an early right anterior negativity (ERAN, reflecting music-syntactic processing) and an N5 (reflecting processing of meaning information) in the ERPs, as well as clear changes in the SCRs (reflecting that unexpected chords also elicited emotional responses). The ERAN was not influenced by emotional expression, whereas N5 potentials elicited by chords in general (regardless of their chord function) differed between the expressive and the non-expressive condition.
Cool 
.
.Stumble It!
Wired Campus – Our Brains Attribute Human Qualities to Humanoid Machines, July 9, 2008
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