The effect of music upon cognition: behavioural, neural and modelling studies. (360G-Wellcome-106279_Z_14_Z)

My long-term aim in this project is to understand how music can impact upon cognitive task performance in Alzheimer's patients. A key element of my work will be to select a range of musical pieces that are most likely to elicit changes in cognition. The key goals of the proposal are: 1. Assess how different music conditions affect performance of basic cognitive tasks. 2. Provide a quantitative physiological description (e.g. heart rate, blood pressure and respiration) of consequences for t he above. Are these good indicators of a subject's arousal levels, and cognitive performance? 3. Use neuroimaging to elicit activation of the brain regions that are recruited during listening to these musical pieces. Perform structural equation modelling to assess the different networks active when listening to the different types of music? Does music act directly upon cognitive function, or indirectly by activating mood/arousal pathways? 4. Build a computational model that takes the struc tural networks from goal 3 above to assess how network performance is modulated by perturbing these networks. This model can then be used to predict network activation in clinical populations where the alterations in network structure have already been characterised (e.g. alter hippocampal activation representing atrophy in Alzheimer's patients).