Welcome to UNLV's Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory!

The ACNL is in the Department of Psychology @ UNLV, and was founded in 2007. We are proud to collaborate with scholars at UNLV and from around the world on projects about how the brain does sound and other topics that take advantage of our skills and interests.

News and recent publications:

Commentary on the Information Integration Theory of consciousness is out in Nature Neuroscience (also see responses to our commentary by the IIT people and a more neutral pair of scientists). Relatedly, Joel was interviewed for a New York Times story on our commentary and also the new empirical findings by the Cogitate consortium in Nature, and appeared on the Neuro Network Podcast discussing these issues.

Review article out in Nature Reviews Psychology on musical rhythm, beat, and meter, by Joel Snyder, Reyna Gordon, and Erin Hannon, plus a companion editorial! We focus especially on oscillator and predictive coding mechanisms, and also review recent progress on development and genetics.

Two new articles published!! One is first-authored by Maggie McMullin about perception of natural auditory scenes and is in Open Mind. The other is first-authored by Solena Mednicoff about the connections between misophonia, ASMR, and musical chills and appears in a special issue on 'Sensing and Feeling' in Phil Trans B.

Maggie McMullin was interviewed on a podcast about her work on perception of natural auditory scenes.

The #EEGManyLabs sub-project replicating Mathewson et al. 2009 for which Dan Berkowitz is going to collect and analyze data received an in principle acceptance, which means the project can move forward to the data collection stage and will be published once completed as proposed. This sub-project will test whether the phase of alpha brain oscillations at the time of stimulus onset influences awareness of the stimulus.

Erin Hannon will be presenting Dan Berkowitz's work on development of musical groove in Helsinki in June 2024 at the Neurosciences and Music Conference. We will be presenting a poster on this work and how groove in children relates to other musical and non-musical constructs, and also a poster on whether groove modulates activity in primary motor cortex.

Jordan Sundara was accepted to the UNLV School of Medicine for Fall 2024 🥳🥳🥳!!!

A group of consciousness researchers, including Joel, wrote an open letter critiquing some a well-known theory of consciousness. It's made a splash on twitter, and is covered by Nature and New Scientist.

Joel will be participating in a public discussion panel about Music and Brain Health at UNLV in May 2024. 

Karli Nave presented preliminary findings for our multi-lab replication of Nozaradan et al. (2011) at RPPW in the UK in June 2023. We presented them again at the Timing Research Forum and BTSCon in October 2023, and again at the ARO conference in February 2024. The BTSCon talk recording can be seen here.

We presented papers on music perception and misophonia at ICMPC in Japan 🇯🇵🍣 in August 2023! See program for details.