98 Stefan Koelsch peated, despite lack of clear evidence supporting this supposition for humans; for reviews see Fitch (2005) and Fitch (2006), for other accounts on adaptive functions of music see the Seven Cs (Koelsch et al., 2010).As mentioned above, psychological states indexed by sound information also in-clude intentions. An fMRI study by Steinbeis & Koelsch (2008c) showed that lis-teners automatically engage social cognition during listening to music, in an at-tempt to decode the intentions of the composer or performer (as indicated by activa-tions of the cortical theory-of-mind network). That study also reported activations of posterior temporal regions implicated in semantic processing (Lau et. al, 2008), pre-sumably because the decoding of intentions has meaning quality.Symbolic musical meaning emerges from arbitrary extra-musical associations. The symbolic sign quality of musical information can be conventional (e. g., any national anthem, soundtracks of movies and television series, music speci c for a particular ritual, commercial jingle music, etc.), or idiosyncratic (e. g., the association between musical information an the memory of an event, a musical signal used as a personal telephone ringtone, etc.). Symbolic musical meaning also includes social associ-ations such as associations between music and social or ethnic groups (for the infu-ence of such associations on behaviour see Patel, 2008).For conventional symbolic sign quality, Davies (1994) uses the term “arbitrary stipulation of stand-alone meaning” (ibid., p. 34)2 . The meaning of the majority of words is due to this sign quality. For idiosyncratic symbolic sign quality, Koopman & Davies (2001) used the term “meaning for the subject” (p. 268). Cross (2008) refers to symbolic musical meaning as culturally enactive, emphasising that symbolic qual-ities of musical practice are shaped by (and shape) culture: “This dimension is rooted in the conventional and institutional use of music and is likely to be depend-ent in part on the frequency of co-occurrence of music and personal or social situ-ations, in part on the trajectories of individual and social histories, and subject to the contingencies of cultural formation and change”.Extra-musical meaning and the N400 The following section will illustrate that processing of extra-musical meaning is re-fected in the N400 component of the event-related potential (ERP). Readers not fa-miliar with ERPs may well skip this section and continue with the section on intra-musical meaning (for an introductory chapter see Koelsch, 2012). The N400 is an electrophysiological index of the processing of meaning information, particularly conceptual/semantic processing or lexical access, and/or post-lexical semantic in-tegration (for details see Friederici & Wartenburger, 2010; Lau et al., 2008). The N400 has negative polarity and is maximal over centro-parietal electrode sites when eli-cited by auditory stimuli. It usually emerges at about 250 ms after the onset of word stimulation and reaches its maximal amplitude at around 400 ms. The N400 elicited by words is highly sensitive to manipulations of semantic relations, being attenu-2 Davies also provides a number of interesting examples for symbolic musical meaning (ibid., pp. 40–47).