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Biomedical subjects

A R Halpern

Publications and source records attributed to A R Halpern.

15 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2001

Absolute pitch and planum temporale.

An increased leftward asymmetry of the planum temporale (PT) in absolute-pitch (AP) musicians has been previously reported, with speculation that early exposure to music influences the degree of PT asymmetry. To test this hypothesis and to determine whether a larger left PT or a smaller right PT actually accounts for the increased overall PT asymmetry in AP musicians, anatomical magnetic resonance images were taken from a right-handed group of 27 AP musicians, 27 nonmusicians, and 22 non-AP musicians. A significantly greater leftward PT asymmetry and a significantly smaller right absolute PT size for the AP musicians compared to the two control groups was found, while the left PT was only marginally larger in the AP group. The absolute size of the right PT and not the left PT was a better predictor of music group membership, possibly indicating "pruning" of the right PT rather than expansion of the left underlying the increased PT asymmetry in AP musicians. Although early exposure to music may be a prerequisite for acquiring AP, the increased PT asymmetry in AP musicians may be determined in utero, implicating possible genetic influences on PT asymmetry. This may explain why the increased PT asymmetry of AP musicians was not seen in the group of early beginning non-AP musicians.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

Cerebral substrates of musical imagery.

Musical imagery refers to the experience of "replaying" music by imagining it inside the head. Whereas visual imagery has been extensively studied, few people have investigated imagery in the auditory domain. This article reviews a program of research that has tried to characterize auditory imagery for music using both behavioral and cognitive neuroscientific tools. I begin by describing some of my behavioral studies of the mental analogues of musical tempo, pitch, and temporal extent. I then describe four studies using three techniques that examine the correspondence of brain involvement in actually perceiving vs. imagining familiar music. These involve one lesion study with epilepsy surgery patients, two positron emission tomography (PET) studies, and one study using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). The studies converge on the importance of the right temporal neocortex and other right-hemisphere structures in the processing of both perceived and imagined nonverbal music. Perceiving and imagining songs that have words also involve structures in the left hemisphere. The supplementary motor area (SMA) is activated during musical imagery; it may mediate rehearsal that involves motor programs, such as imagined humming. Future studies are suggested that would involve imagery of sounds that cannot be produced by the vocal tract to clarify the role of the SMA in auditory imagery.

Behavior↗
PubMed2000

Implicit memory for music in Alzheimer's disease.

Short, unfamiliar melodies were presented to young and older adults and to Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients in an implicit and an explicit memory task. The explicit task was yes-no recognition, and the implicit task was pleasantness ratings, in which memory was shown by higher ratings for old versus new melodies (the mere exposure effect). Young adults showed retention of the melodies in both tasks. Older adults showed little explicit memory but did show the mere exposure effect. The AD patients showed neither. The authors considered and rejected several artifactual reasons for this null effect in the context of the many studies that have shown implicit memory among AD patients. As the previous studies have almost always used the visual modality for presentation, they speculate that auditory presentation, especially of nonverbal material, may be compromised in AD because of neural degeneration in auditory areas in the temporal lobes.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

Identification of speeded and slowed familiar melodies by younger, middle-aged, and older musicians and nonmusicians.

There is a range of tempos within which listeners can identify familiar tunes (around 0.8 to 6.0 notes/s). Faster and slower tunes are difficult to identify. The authors assessed fast and slow melody-identification thresholds for 80 listeners ages 17-79 years with expertise varying from musically untrained to professional. On fast-to-slow (FS) trials the tune started at a very fast tempo and slowed until the listener identified it. Slow-to-fast (SF) trials started slow and accelerated. Tunes either retained their natural rhythms or were stylized isochronous versions. Increased expertise led to better performance for both FS and SF thresholds (r = .45). Performance declined uniformly across the 62-year age range in the FS condition (r = .27). SF performance was unaffected by age. Although early encoding processes may slow with age, expertise has a greater effect. Musical expertise involves perceptual learning with melodies at a wide range of tempos.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1996

Effects of aging and musical experience on the representation of tonal hierarchies.

Two experiments explored the representation of the tonal hierarchy in Western music among older (aged 60 to 80) and younger (aged 15 to 22) musicians and nonmusicians. A probe tone technique was used: 4 notes from the major triad were presented, followed by 1 note chosen from the 12 notes of the chromatic scale. Whereas musicians had a better sense of the tonal hierarchy than nonmusicians, older adults were no worse than younger adults in differentiating the notes according to musical principles. However, older adults were more prone than younger adults to classify the notes by frequency proximity (pitch height) when proximity was made more salient, as were nonmusicians compared with musicians. With notes having ambiguous pitch height, pitch height effects disappeared among older adults but not nonmusicians. Older adults seem to have internalized tonal structure, but they sometimes fail to inhibit less musically relevant information.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1995

Aging and experience in the recognition of musical transpositions.

The authors examined the effects of age, musical experience, and characteristics of musical stimuli on a melodic short-term memory task in which participants had to recognize whether a tune was an exact transposition of another tune recently presented. Participants were musicians and nonmusicians between ages 18 and 30 or 60 and 80. In 4 experiments, the authors found that age and experience affected different aspects of the task, with experience becoming more influential when interference was provided during the task. Age and experience interacted only weakly, and neither age nor experience influenced the superiority of tonal over atonal materials. Recognition memory for the sequences did not reflect the same pattern of results as the transposition task. The implications of these results for theories of aging, experience, and music cognition are discussed.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1995

Recognition of familiar and unfamiliar melodies in normal aging and Alzheimer's disease.

We tested normal young and elderly adults and elderly Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients on recognition memory for tunes. In Experiment 1, AD patients and age-matched controls received a study list and an old/new recognition test of highly familiar, traditional tunes, followed by a study list and test of novel tunes. The controls performed better than did the AD patients. The controls showed the "mirror effect" of increased hits and reduced false alarms for traditional versus novel tunes, whereas the patients false-alarmed as often to traditional tunes as to novel tunes. Experiment 2 compared young adults and healthy elderly persons using a similar design. Performance was lower in the elderly group, but both younger and older subjects showed the mirror effect. Experiment 3 produced confusion between preexperimental familiarity and intraexperimental familiarity by mixing traditional and novel tunes in the study lists and tests. Here, the subjects in both age groups resembled the patients of Experiment 1 in failing to show the mirror effect. Older subjects again performed more poorly, and they differed qualitatively from younger subjects in setting stricter criteria for more nameable tunes. Distinguishing different sources of global familiarity is a factor in tune recognition, and the data suggest that this type of source monitoring is impaired in AD and involves different strategies in younger and older adults.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

Effect of unilateral temporal-lobe excision on perception and imagery of songs.

Auditory imagery for songs was studied in two groups of patients with left or right temporal-lobe excision for control of epilepsy, and a group of matched normal control subjects. Two tasks were used. In the perceptual task, subjects saw the text of a familiar song and simultaneously heard it sung. On each trial they judged if the second of two capitalized lyrics was higher or lower in pitch than the first. The imagery task was identical in all respects except that no song was presented, so that subjects had to generate an auditory image of the song. The results indicated that all subjects found the imagery task more difficult than the perceptual task, but patients with right temporal-lobe damage performed significantly worse on both tasks than either patients with left temporal-lobe lesions or normal control subjects. These results support the idea that imagery arises from activation of a neural substrate shared with perceptual mechanisms, and provides evidence for a right temporal-lobe specialization for this type of auditory imaginal processing.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

Memory biases in left versus right implied motion.

People remember moving objects as having moved farther along in their path of motion than is actually the case; this is known as representational momentum (RM). Some authors have argued that RM is an internalization of environmental properties such as physical momentum and gravity. Five experiments demonstrated that a similar memory bias could not have been learned from the environment. For right-handed S, objects apparently moving to the right engendered a larger memory bias in the direction of motion than did those moving to the left. This effect, clearly not derived from real-world lateral asymmetries, was relatively insensitive to changes in apparent velocity and the type of object used, and it may be confined to objects in the left half of visual space. The left-right effect may be an intrinsic property of the visual operating system, which may in turn have affected certain cultural conventions of left and right in art and other domains.

Attention↗
PubMed1989

Memory for the absolute pitch of familiar songs.

Four experiments were conducted to examine the ability of people without "perfect pitch" to retain the absolute pitch of familiar tunes. In Experiment 1, participants imagined given tunes, and then hummed their first notes four times either between or within sessions. The variability of these productions was very low. Experiment 2 used a recognition paradigm, with results similar to those in Experiment 1 for musicians, but with some additional variability shown for unselected subjects. In Experiment 3, subjects rated the suitability of various pitches to start familiar tunes. Previously given preferred notes were rated high, as were notes three or four semitones distant from the preferred notes, but not notes one or two semitones distant. In Experiment 4, subjects mentally transformed the pitches of familiar tunes to the highest and lowest levels possible. These experiments suggest some retention of the absolute pitch of tunes despite a paucity of verbal or visual cues for the pitch.

Adult↗
PubMed1988

Mental scanning in auditory imagery for songs.

Four experiments examined how people operate on memory representations of familiar songs. The tasks were similar to those used in studies of visual imagery. In one task, subjects saw a one-word lyric from a song and then saw a second lyric; then they had to say if the second lyric was from the same song as the first. In a second task, subjects mentally compared pitches of notes corresponding to song lyrics. In both tasks, reaction time increased as a function of the distance in beats between the two lyrics in the actual song, and in some conditions reaction time increased with the starting beat of the earlier lyric. Imagery instructions modified the main results somewhat in the first task, but not in the second, much harder task. The results suggest that song representations have temporal-like characteristics.

Humans↗
PubMedDate not supplied

When that tune runs through your head: a PET investigation of auditory imagery for familiar melodies.

The present study used positron emission tomography (PET) to examine the cerebral activity pattern associated with auditory imagery for familiar tunes. Subjects either imagined the continuation of nonverbal tunes cued by their first few notes, listened to a short sequence of notes as a control task, or listened and then reimagined that short sequence. Subtraction of the activation in the control task from that in the real-tune imagery task revealed primarily right-sided activation in frontal and superior temporal regions, plus supplementary motor area (SMA). Isolating retrieval of the real tunes by subtracting activation in the reimagine task from that in the real-tune imagery task revealed activation primarily in right frontal areas and right superior temporal gyrus. Subtraction of activation in the control condition from that in the reimagine condition, intended to capture imagery of unfamiliar sequences, revealed activation in SMA, plus some left frontal regions. We conclude that areas of right auditory association cortex, together with right and left frontal cortices, are implicated in imagery for familiar tunes, in accord with previous behavioral, lesion and PET data. Retrieval from musical semantic memory is mediated by structures in the right frontal lobe, in contrast to results from previous studies implicating left frontal areas for all semantic retrieval. The SMA seems to be involved specifically in image generation, implicating a motor code in this process.

Acoustic Stimulation↗