cOMPaRatiVe cOGNitiONHumans share acousticpreferences with other animalsLogan S. James1,2,3,4* Sarah C. Woolley 1,2, Jon T. Sakata1,2,Courtney B. Hilton5,6, Michael J. Ryan3,4, Samuel A. Mehr5,7,8Many animals produce courtship sounds, and receivers prefersome sounds over others. Shared ancestry and convergentevolution may generate similarities in preference across speciesand underlie Darwin’s conjecture that some animals “havenearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have.” In this study,we show that humans share acoustic preferences with a rangeof animals, that the strength of human preferences correlateswith that in other animals, and that humans respond fasterwhen in agreement with animals. Furthermore, we foundgreatest agreement in preference for adorned, ancestral, andlower-frequency sounds. humans’ music listening experiencewas associated with preferences. These results are consistentwith theories arguing that biases in processing sculpt acousticpreferences, and they confirm Darwin’s century-old hunchabout the conservation of aesthetics in nature

out now in Science: @loganjames.bsky.social collected pairs of sounds in 16 species where we *know* which sound is more attractive (to that species)

he played them to ppl on themusiclab.org, asking, in each pair, which was nicer. humans agreed w other animals

doi.org/10.1126/science.aea1202

‘Part of our biological toolkit’: newborn babies can anticipate rhythm in music, researchers find Brain activity suggests newborns can detect and predict patterns relating to rhythm, study says Newborn babies can anticipate rhythm in pieces of music, researchers have discovered, offering insights into a fundamental human trait. Babies in the womb begin to respond to music by about eight or nine months, as shown by changes in their heart rate and body movements, said Dr Roberta Bianco, the first author of the research who is based at the Italian Institute of Technology in Rome. Continue reading...

‘Part of our biological toolkit’: newborn babies can anticipate rhythm in music, researchers find

Here is our latest work on newborns and music perception!

The MSCA funds two three-year PhD positions with research in collaboration with the ultra-high field Magnetic Resonance center Imago7 located in Pisa). Deadline: 27th of February 2026

Characterizing individual brain differences to advance personalized diagnosis, treatment, and sustainable healthcare

The University of Pisa (PI Paola Binda) is recruiting two PhD candidates in the MSCA network indibrain.eu. Neuroscience students with an interest for the sensory brain are particularly encouraged to apply (webform: apply.workable.com/umcg1/j/5CA7...). .

macaques can synchronize to a subjective beat in real music and even spontaneously do so over alternative strategies.

Haven’t read the full article yet, but this is a big deal if true!
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

How does the brain track patterns 🎶 in a noisy world 🔊? How does it choose when to reset its memory and when to carry it forward?

We provide some answers in this new work by @kahomagami.bsky.social that I co-authored with @mariachait.bsky.social, Marcus Pearce and Edward Hall!

We are remarkably good at recognizing natural auditory “textures”, such as the soothing sound of a running brook or fire crackling in a chimney. But do you think you could remember the exact rain texture that opens “Riders on the Storm”?

#auditoryscience #musicscience #neuroscience

These complementary computational strategies highlight the flexibility of hearing in its most important task: using traces of the past to better deal with the present – even when the “past” is just a particular patch of rain at the start of a song.

Here, we suggest an additional trick your auditory system could use: randomly sampling a few auditory features in time, to create a compact but distinctive “fingerprint” for the memorised sound.

Storing all details of complex, stochastic sounds would be biologically unreasonable. Earlier work showed that “summary statistics” – long-term averages of sound features – are an efficient way to identify broad classes of natural textures.

This memory trace was highly specific to the repeated recording: it distinguished that particular texture from many other recordings coming from the same physical source (same type of fire, or water...).

This raises a deeper question: what kind of internal representation is being stored in memory?

The key is repetition. As with artificial sounds previously studied (like noise bursts and clicks), the re-occurrence of a natural texture was enough to create a memory trace.

a painting of rain drops falling on a tiled floor by duc-koolh ALT: a painting of rain drops falling on a tiled floor by duc-koolh

Do you think you could remember the exact rain texture that opens “Riders on the Storm”?
We showed that the answer may be a surprising “yes” – at least in some circumstances.

Check our new work with @Bastug, @Rajendran, @Agus @Chait @Pressnitzer doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

Brain Dynamics of Mental Manipulation Humans effortlessly juggle their internal thoughts, but the neuronal dynamics that support mental manipulation are largely unknown. Leveraging the high spatiotemporal fidelity of intracranial recordin...

What happens in the brain when we manipulate our thoughts?

We asked 30 epilepsy patients to mentally invert short melodies.

Intracerebral #iEEG recordings suggest brain synchrony and sensory inhibition are key for mental manipulation:

doi.org/10.1101/2025...

#neuroskyence #musicscience

Postdoc position on multi brain stimulation in Rome in an amazing lab!! Do apply!!!

Development of Auditory and Spontaneous Movement Responses to Music over the First Year of Life Humans across cultures not only share the ability to recognise music but also respond to it through movement. While the sensory encoding of music is well-studied, when and how infants naturally start ...

Check out our new preprint on how infants respond to music over the first year of life! 👶🧠💃🎶
While neural responses are pretty much ready to go in the youngest, moving to music takes a bit longer, becoming more complex and potentially more dance-like by 12 months. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Our new MEG preprint on Building&Updating Predictive Models in auditory sequences 🧠🔊
✅ auditory-frontal areas & #hippocampus drive adaptive perception

with Maria Chait, M Pearce, K Magami @UCL
#Neuroscience #PredictiveProcessing #StatisticalLearning #BrainResearch #AuditoryPerception #musicscience

Flexible tapping synchronization in macaques: dynamic switching of timing strategies within rhythmic sequences www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03....

Here it is our new preprint on neural encoding of musical expectations in newborns!

in collaboration with B. Toth & I. Winkler's hungrain team and @giacomonovembre.bsky.social 's NPAlab

check it out 👇
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#musicscience #Neuroscience #MusicCognition #Neurodevelopment

Fantastic opportunity to work on music and the brain!

🚨 We’re hiring! 🚨

A postdoc position is available at my lab (npa.iit.it) in Rome! Join us to explore:

🎵 Neural bases of musicality (humans, infants, macaques)
💃🕺 Dance & joint music-making
🤝 Spontaneous social behavior

⬇️ Apply through the link below! ⬇️

How accurately can we estimate spontaneous body kinematics from video recordings? Effect of movement amplitude on OpenPose accuracy - Behavior Research Methods Estimating how the human body moves in space and time—body kinematics—has important applications for industry, healthcare, and several research fields. Gold-standard methodologies capturing body kinem...

How well can video-based methods estimate body kinematics? In my recent paper with @giacomonovembre.bsky.social, we show that accuracy of one such method (OpenPose) varied substantially across subjects & body parts. Interestingly, this accuracy strongly depended on the movement amplitude. t.ly/4Tlnc

Models optimized for real-world tasks reveal the task-dependent necessity of precise temporal coding in hearing - Nature Communications Ears encode sound with precisely timed spikes, but the perceptual role of this temporal coding remains uncertain. Here, the authors report that high-fidelity temporal coding is necessary for neural ne...

New paper from our lab, by Mark Saddler, using machine learning to test the role of temporal coding in hearing. Here is a quick summary. (1/n)
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Enhancing eye tracking for nonhuman primates and other subjects unable to follow instructions: Adaptive calibration and validation of Tobii eye trackers with the Titta toolbox - Behavior Research Meth... Accurate eye tracking is crucial for gaze-dependent research, but calibrating eye trackers in subjects who cannot follow instructions, such as human infants and nonhuman primates, presents a challenge...

Open-source software allows the calibration of eye trackers for subjects who can't follow instructions (infants, primates). Extension to Titta toolbox uses attention-grabbing videos for calibration, tested successfully with chimps, baboons & macaques
link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Emotions in multi-brain dynamics: A promising research frontier Emotions drive and influence social interactions. Actions and reactions driven by emotions are dynamically modulated by continuous feedback loops betw…

Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews

Emotions in multi-brain dynamics: A promising research frontier
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Population connectivity shapes the distribution and complexity of chimpanzee cumulative culture Although cumulative culture is a hallmark of hominin evolution, its origins can be traced back to our common ancestor with chimpanzees. Here, we investigated the evolutionary origins of chimpanzee cum...

Fascinating work from Andrea Migliano’s group, out in Science, on cultural evolution, showing how population connectivity shapes the distribution and complexity of chimpanzee cumulative culture
(Congrats @ceciliapad.bsky.social & colleagues not yet on this platform)
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

We are recruiting postdocs! Want to grow your own social networks to study creativity, cultural evolution & decision-making? We are hiring an NSF-funded postdoc at Cornell in collaboration with UC Davis, CUNY, & Princeton. Apply here : academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/28959

Hi all! Can I be added please?