Maja Bresjanac
Institute of Pathophysiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Neural correlates of movement, movement perception and mental imagery of movement have been shown to extensively overlap. The aim of our pilot exploration was to employ music-induced dance imagery to study dance responses to music. Healthy, young adult volunteers (18 non-dancers (7 male and 11 female) and 17 dancers (9 male, 8 female)) were recruited for the fMRI-based study using a 3T scanner. Resting state BOLD signal was recorder first, followed by BOLD signal recordings during blocks of listening to music with instructions on how to respond to it with mental dance imagery. Clips of groovy (dance music) and non-groovy (foreign national anthems) instrumental music were used as stimuli. Immediate feed-back was obtained from the subjects on the extent of experienced mental imagery of dance as well as on their emotional engagement while listening to the music. The subjects’ heart rate was simultaneously recorded to provide a physiological measure of arousal (Vovk et al., this volume). To obtain insight into neural activity underlying mental imagery of movement, movement observation and emotional engagement (without musical stimuli) in the same subjects, BOLD signal was also recorded while participants were instructed to imagine swimming, observing a swimmer, experiencing a passionate kiss, etc. (Politakis et al., this volume). The results revealed interesting behavioural as well as neural activation responses that point to expected commonalities, but also to some less expected differences between dancers and non-dancers in their responses to groovy and non-groovy music.