John Iversen
Auditory Perception: Music, Rhythm and Movement

Welcome.

I am a researcher at The University of California San Diego in the Institute for Neural Computation and the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience

Research

This site is somewhat out of date...Some more recent work can be found here

Most broadly, my work is devoted to understanding how humans perceive the world—how we create a rich and detailed view of the world from sensory stimuli. Central to this work is the idea that perception is fundamentally a constructive process, involving the integration of multiple senses as well as behavior. A variety of approaches are taken, both behavioral and neurophysiological, applied to the study of multi-modal relations in perception, as well as sensory-motor coupling. Fundamental to this work is the use of music perception and production as a tool for the study of complex brain processes, including those that may underlie language. Research at NSI has progressed along several main directions concerning a) brain mechanisms of auditory perception in humans, b) rhythm processing, and c) the relation between language and music. A common theme running through all of these projects is rhythm— most generally understood as the organization of events in time. Research projects have included studies of 1) how perception of rhythm can depend on a listener’s native language, 2) how listeners synchronize with the regular beat found in rhythms of varying complexity, comparing performance when rhythms are presented aurally versus visually, 3) how attention to a sound modifies response to that sound, 4) auditory stream segregation, 5) how intentional subjective perception of the ‘’beat’ of a rhythm modulates neural responses and perception.

An article explaining my interests was published by The Neurosciences Institute: About me

Education

Publications

The impact of music training on child development

I am directing the SIMPHONY project, in cooperation with UCSDs Center for Human Development. SIMPHONY is a longitudinal study of how learning to play music might modify brain and behavioral developmental trajectories.

We are currently collecting data for the second year. Baseline data was presented in a talk “SIMPHONY: Studying the impact music practice has on neurodevelopment in youth” Presented at the Society for Music Perception and Cognition annual conference, August 2014, Toronto, CA. The talk is available on request.

Press on music, brain and educaion in general, mentioning SIMPHONY: The Atlantic, NBC, BBC, Grammy Foundation, Voice of San Diego

ASAP: The evolution of musical beat processing, and importance of the motor system for auditory perception..

Patel AD, Iversen JR (2014) The evolutionary neuroscience of musical beat perception: the Action Simulation for Auditory Prediction (ASAP) hypothesis. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. [pdf]

A brand new theoretical paper tying together our work in beat processing in humans and non-human animals. We propose the ASAP hypothesis, which suggests motor planning plays a causal role in rhythm perception.

Neural mechanisms of beat perception.

Iversen, J.R. Repp, B. R., & Patel, A.D. (2009). Top-down control of rhythm perception modulates early auditory responses. Ann NY Acad Sci, 1169:58-73. (Neurosciences and Music III.) [pdf]

When listening to a rhythm, what we perceive depends on where we hear the beat. We show how this imaginative, interpretive act affects how the brain responds to sound.

Beat perception in non-human animals.

Aniruddh D. Patel, John R. Iversen, Micah R. Bregman, and Irena Schulz (2009) Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal, Current Biology, 19:827-830. [pdf] [movie]

We demonstrate that a non-human animal, Snowball, a sulphur crested cockatoo, can synchronize with a musical beat. This ability was previously thought to be uniquely human. We suggest this ability might build on tight auditory-motor coupling that underlies vocal learning, an ability both humans and parrots share.

Press: CBS News [new], NPR Science Friday, NPR All Things Considered, Popular Science, Science Now, BBC World Service, BBC News, National Geographic, Science News, Boston Globe, Associated Press, Google News, EFE (Spain), Globe and Mail (Canada), New Scientist, CNN, nature.com ars technica, slashdot, CBS 8. Smithsonian

The original YouTube video that sparked this research: [video]

Rhythm Perception and Culture

Iversen, JR, Patel AD, and Ohgushi, K. (2008) Perception of rhythmic grouping depends on auditory experience. JASA 124: 2263-2271. [pdf] [supplementary info (ftp)] [popular version] [press]

We show that a basic aspect of perception long thought to be universal in fact depends on culture. We hypothesize that language experience is the driving force, suggesting an interaction between language and basic auditory perception.

Yoshida, K., Iversen, J.R., Patel, A.D., Mazuka, R., Nito, H., Gervain, J., & Werker, J. (2010). The development of perceptual grouping biases in infancy: A Japanese-English cross-linguistic study. Cognition, 115:356-361. [pdf]

Research on Japanese and English-learning infants show that the adult perceptual preferences are present at 7-8 months of age, but are not present at 5-6 months. This supports the idea that language learning shapes basic rhythm perception.

Ongoing Projects

Disorders of beat perception and production (The BAT test)

Iversen, J.R, & Patel, A.D. (2008). The Beat Alignment Test (BAT): Surveying beat processing abilities in the general population. In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Music Perception & Cognition (ICMPC10), August 2008, Sapporo, Japan. K. Miyazaki et al. (Eds.), Adelaide: Causal Productions. [paper] [poster]

New 10/11: Version 2 of the BAT test
The BAT test is freely available for other researchers to use. Download materials and instructions here. Please contact John Iversen for more information.

Auditory selective attention

Iversen, J.R., Patel, A.D., Chen, Y., Gally, J. A., & Edelman, G. M. (2008). Selective attention to one of two competing auditory rhythms modulates phase of brain responses to the attended rhythm. Cognitive Neuroscience Society Annual Meeting, San Francisco. [poster]

Beat perception and synchronization

Iversen, J.R., A.D. Patel, B. Nicodemus, K. Emmorey. (submitted). Synchronization to auditory and visual rhythms in hearing and deaf individuals. Cognition.

Patel, A.D., Iversen, J.R., Chen, Y., & Repp, B.H. (2005). The influence of metricality and modality on synchronization with a beat. Experimental Brain Research, 163:226-238. [paper]

Please contact me at jiversen@ucsd.edu
Modified: 5/21/10