Psyche Loui
Northeastern University, MA·Psychology
Music touches memory, motivation, reward and surprise, which makes it a useful window into the mind. It can also help people who are ill.
- Fields
Psychology
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
creativity
music cognition
expectation violation
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- Relate people's ability to invent stories in response to music and to compose melodies on a simple computer interface to standard measures of individual differences in creativity.
- Test whether listeners judge stories and melodies as creative based on how much they fulfil or violate expectations, quantified with natural language processing and music information retrieval tools.
- Use electroencephalography (EEG), a scalp recording of brain electrical activity, to link neural markers of creativity and innovation to moments when expectations are violated.
- Test whether gamma-MBI, 40 Hz flickering light that adapts to self-selected music, reliably influences brain activity in participants with mild Alzheimer's disease.
- Refine the gamma-music protocol so it is adaptive, motivating and rewarding to use, and generate predictions about which participants would benefit most.
More about the research
One project asks how creativity relates to breaking expectations. Another tests whether music can carry a light-based brain stimulation approach for people with early Alzheimer's disease.
Why it matters
The gamma-music approach could become an enjoyable, home-friendly intervention that may slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease and help patients keep a better quality of life, while also indicating which patients are most likely to benefit. The creativity studies aim to build a model of how expectation and surprise produce creative work, which could inform ways to foster innovation.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Chung Yin Joseph Lau
Northwestern University, IL·Neuroscience
Test whether the balance between top-down expectation signals and local speech representations is disrupted in autism, using EEG to measure context-dependent processing of speech sounds.
Erin Wamsley
Furman University, SC·Neuroscience
Test whether memories are reactivated and strengthened during seconds-long periods of waking rest, as they are during sleep, using EEG combined with measures of pupil size, reported thoughts and behavior.
Anson Kairys
University of Michigan, MI·Neuroscience·Early-career
Compare subjective (self-reported) and objective (test-based) cognitive function between people with fibromyalgia and healthy controls, and assess how co-occurring symptoms shape the relationship between the two.
The school
Northeastern University: 27 labs on PI Pages, $347M a year on research, 251 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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