Behavioral and neural methods for comparing dynamic, subjective experiences

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Runxuan Niu¹ (niu_rx@pku.edu.cn), Lusha Zhu¹, Zhihao Zhang², Andrew Kayser^3,4, Mark Bartholomew⁵, Ming Hsu³; ¹Peking University, ²University of Virginia, ³University of California, Berkeley, ⁴University of California, San Francisco, ⁵State University of New York at Buffalo

Characterizing and comparing human aesthetic experiences from the perspective of the average, or ordinary, person is central to legal decision-making, including legal subject areas like copyright law. However, there is little consensus on how it can even be done empirically and scientifically, because of the presumed challenge for people to reflect on and report their own subjective experiences with complex stimuli that unfold over time. To address these challenges, we developed an empirical framework to evaluate music copyright infringement by systematically manipulating song elements, thereby establishing an integrative approach combining behavioral and neural methods to derive an average group opinion. Specifically, due to the legal requirement for plaintiffs to prove that the allegedly infringing element is both similar to the original and central to the defendant's work, we created modified versions of songs by removing or replacing certain musical elements. We then asked participants to evaluate the subjective distances of these variants from the defendant’s original song (N = 151). Our method was first tested on a historical case with a resolved legal judgment, where the behavioral judgments from our approach matched the historical ruling, and it was then applied to a recent, highly controversial case. In both instances, the perceived distances measured behaviorally were consistent with neural distances characterized by cross-brain alpha coherence during a separate EEG passive listening task (N = 43). Taken together, these results demonstrate a practical behavioral framework, supported by neural evidence, for evaluating music infringement, thereby informing legal debates with empirically grounded insights.

Topic Area: THINKING: Decision making