Abstract
Research has indicated that, when performing joint-music making tasks in pairs, empathic traits aid aligning one’s actions with the other participant, and thereby, achieving greater musical synchrony (Novembre et al., 2019; Tzanaki et al., 2025). Peculiarly, even in the absence of another individual, that is, a set-up in which participants move with their whole body to music, empathic traits have been found associated with stronger behavioural synchronisation to music (Bamford & Davidson, 2019). One suggestion to explain the observed link between empathy and rhythmic entrainment is that there might be a more fundamental neural mechanism that both synchronisation and empathic processes happen to benefit from (Bamford & Davidson, 2019). Despite speculations, to date, research including neuroimaging data to test this possibility is lacking. This master thesis project aims to fill this gap by testing the candidate mechanism of neural entrainment, given its established relationship with sensorimotor synchronisation (Lakatos et al., 2019). In this presentation I will provide an overview of the research background and paradigm used for this master thesis project.
Bio
Merel is a master student at the Psychology: Cognitive Neuroscience program at the University of Oslo. She has been involved in the Entrainment project led by Maja Dyhre Foldal at the RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of Rhythm, Time, and Motion since autumn 2024, which eventually led to the current master thesis project.