Predicting Individual Differences from Brain Responses to Music: A Comparison of Functional Connectivity Measures.

Individual differences are known to modulate brain responses to music. Recent neuroscience research suggests that each individual has unique and fundamentally stable functional brain connections irrespective of task. Our study aims to identify individual differences such as gender and musical expertise from brain responses to music. Thirty-six participants’ functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) responses were measured while listening to three 8-min-long musical pieces representing different musical styles. They were analyzed using various temporal and spectral functional connectivity (FC) measures. These FC measures were compared to identify the one that captured the most variation associated with gender and musical expertise. Subsequently, the measures were used to classify distinct population groupings using a binary Support Vector Machine (SVM). Our results revealed that Coherence, a spectral-domain FC measure, captured the maximum variation for musical stimuli. However, in classifying individuals based on gender and musical expertise, a composite measure outperformed any single measure and had above-chance accuracy. This suggests that each FC measure captures different aspects of the relationship between brain regions and is influenced by the level of analysis (group or individual) and the task, such as similarity analysis or classification. Further ramifications of the findings are discussed.