Project Grant 2242085

This is a $232,000 Project Grant awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences under the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences grant program (CFDA 47.075). The grant supports collaborative research at the University of Maryland, College Park to elucidate the computational and neural mechanisms underlying music enculturation, or how people spontaneously engage with and learn unfamiliar musical cultures. The research combines computational modeling and brain research techniques to investigate how the statistical properties of musical signals are acquired and utilized, providing insight into broader cultural learning processes. The grant will fund experiments examining neural responses to both familiar and unfamiliar music, with the goal of advancing understanding of how complex statistical information reflected in cultural domains is learned and applied. The award will also support public engagement and outreach activities to high school students to involve them in research on music and culture.