Event overview
Maria Herrojo Ruiz (Goldsmiths Dept of Psychology) on understanding the exploration, decision-making and action monitoring to learn about virtuosity and creativity.
Expert music performance relies on the ability to remember, plan, execute, and monitor the performance in order to play expressively and accurately. Maria Herrojo Ruiz's research focuses on examining the neural processes involved in mediating some of these cognitive functions in professional musicians, but also in non-musicians and in patients with movement disorders.
This talk will illustrate different aspects of our current work at Goldsmiths. First, Maria will present new data from our research on error-monitoring during music performance, which takes a novel perspective by examining the interaction between bodily (heart) and neural signals in this process.
In addition, she will present results from our studies in non-musicians investigating the mechanisms by which anxiety modulates learning of novel sensorimotor (piano) sequences. Using electrophysiology and a behavioural task with separate phases of learning – including an exploratory and a reward-based phase – our research could dissociate the influence of anxiety on these two components.
Maria will finish the talk by highlighting what the data on exploration and performance monitoring can teach us about virtuosity and creativity.
Maria Herrojo Ruiz is a lecturer in the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. She studied Theoretical Physics in Madrid, Spain, and later specialised as a postgraduate student in Physics of Complex Systems. She did her doctoral dissertation in Neuroscience as a Marie Curie Fellow in Hanover, Germany, focusing on the neural correlates of error-monitoring during music performance.
As principal investigator in two successive research grants in Berlin, Germany, Maria has been conducting research on the role of the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamocortical circuits in mediating learning and monitoring of sensorimotor sequences, both in healthy human subjects and in patients with movement disorders. Her current research at Goldsmiths focuses on the neural correlates of exploration during piano performance and sensorimotor learning, their modulation by anxiety, and the brain-body interaction during music performance.
About the Whitehead Lecture series
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 25 Oct 2017 | 4:00pm - 5:30pm |
Accessibility
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