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Neural underpinnings of the continuity illusion in musicians

2025· preprint· en· W4410265722 on OpenAlexaff
Alejandra E. Santoyo, Antoine J. Shahin, Daniel J. Levitin, Kristina C. Backer

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typepreprint
Languageen
FieldNeuroscience
TopicMotor Control and Adaptation
Canadian institutionsMcGill University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsIllusionCognitive psychologyPsychologyNeural correlates of consciousnessNeuroscienceCognition

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The continuity illusion occurs when a sound is perceived as continuous through noise-filled interruptions and has been indexed neurophysiologically as reduced auditory theta band (4-8 Hz) power and phase-locking at the interruption boundaries. Here, we examined the behavioral and neurophysiological differences between musicians (n=16) and non-musicians (n=16) as they listened to trisyllabic words and classical music with noise interruptions. Our aim was to assess two competing hypotheses: (H1) because of their enhanced ability to detect acoustic gaps, musicians are less likely to perceive continuity and will therefore exhibit increased theta power/phase-locking at interruption boundaries compared to non-musicians. Alternatively, (H2) musicians are more likely to perceive continuity through an enhanced ability to utilize contextual cues to fill-in missing information. This top-down influence should be demonstrated by reduced theta power/phase-locking in musicians. On each trial, participants reported whether a noise-interrupted music or speech stimulus sounded continuous or interrupted. Behaviorally, musicians and non-musicians had similar rates of perceived continuity for music and speech, except musicians exhibited significantly greater continuity to speech at the shortest noise duration interruption. The oscillatory results demonstrated that relative to non-musicians, musicians had weaker theta phase-locking to the interruption boundaries in both music and speech, supporting H2. Musicians also exhibited enhanced alpha (8-13 Hz) and beta (14-30 Hz) power for both music and speech relative to non-musicians, reflecting inhibitory processes. We conclude that musicians exhibit enhanced auditory-motor inhibition to noise interruptions in both music and speech and infer this is due to their enhanced ability to utilize contextual cues.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.002
Threshold uncertainty score0.006

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.035
GPT teacher head0.271
Teacher spread0.236 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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