Research

My research uses a combination of cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging, computational modeling, and behavioral psychology to probe several aspects of social behavior and predictive coding. In particular, I focus on how neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism impact and are impacted by highly structured, strongly social phenomena such as music. My work has been funded by the NIH, Vanderbilt Kennedy Center, and Ric Weiland Foundation.

Autism, Social Interaction, and Emotional Regulation

This research focuses on the uses of music for enabling social entrainment, especially in people with social functioning disorders such as autism, and for regulating emotional states. It draws on a combination of behavioral and neurological methodologies such as large online surveys, tracking saccadic eye movements, and electroencephalography (EEG), and emphasizes heterogeneity between and within clinical populations, as well as between and within cultures.

Relevant publications:

Fram, N. R., Liu, T., & Lense, M. D. (2024). Social interaction links active musical rhythm engagement and expressive communication in autistic toddlers. Autism Research, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.3090.
Fram, N. R., Alviar, C., Wang, Y., Chawla, S., Edwards, L., Jones, W., Lense, M. D. (2023). Differing predictive strategies in toddlers with and without autism underlie rhythm of social engagement. INSAR 2023, Stockholm, Sweden.
Fram, N. R., Nerness, B., Chander, A., Turnbull, C., Kim, K., Georgieva, E., James, S., Wright, M., Fujioka, T. (2022). The exchange of musical ideas in duet turn-taking improvisation is related to empathy and its between-partner difference, Society for Music Perception and Cognition 2022, Portland, OR.
Fram, N. R., Tsai, J. L., Liew, K., Uchida, Y. (2021). Cultural variation in music-evoked emotions, emotional regulation, and the parametrization of affect, ICMPC16-ESCOM11.

Musical Mediation

This broad area of research concerns the ways in which music functions as a mediator among sensory, cognitive, and cultural domains. It revolves around two conceptual models: the culture-cognition mediator model of musical functionality, which situates music as a key interlocutor between cognitive capacities and cultural norms and patterns; and genredynamics, which describes musical genres as manifolds in an abstract musical space containing both aesthetic and sociocultural features.

Relevant publications:

Fram, N. R. (2023). Music in the middle: A culture-cognition mediator model of musical functionality. Perspectives on Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916221144266.
Fram, N. R. (2023). Genredynamics: A perceptual calculus of genre. Journal of Mathematics and Music. https://doi.org/10.1080/17459737.2022.2149869.
Fram, N. R., Goudarzi, V., Terasawa, H., & Berger, J. (2021). Collaborating in isolation: Assessing the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on patterns of collaborative behavior among working musicians. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 674246. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.674246.
Fram, N. R. (2021). Expecting the twist: How media navigate the intersections among multiple sources of prior knowledge. In Vernallis, C., Kara, S., Leal, J., & Rogers, H. (Eds.), Cybermedia: Explorations in science, sound, and vision. Bloomsbury.

Probabilistic Rhythm Perception

This research emphasizes specific computational implementations of probabilistic models of musical perception, with a particular focus on rhythm. It relies on Bayesian theories of inference to tie music-theoretic concepts such as syncopation to cognitive capacities such as making predictions in time.

Relevant publications:

Fram, N. R. & Berger, J. (2023). Syncopation as probabilistic expectation: Conceptual, computational, and experimental evidence. Cognitive Science, 47(12), e13390. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13390.
Fram, N. R. (2019). Surprisal, Liking, and Musical Affect. In International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music (pp. 275-286). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21392-3_22.