Biomedical subjects

Andrea R Halpern

Publications and source records attributed to Andrea R Halpern.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Mental concerts: musical imagery and auditory cortex.

Most people intuitively understand what it means to "hear a tune in your head." Converging evidence now indicates that auditory cortical areas can be recruited even in the absence of sound and that this corresponds to the phenomenological experience of imagining music. We discuss these findings as well as some methodological challenges. We also consider the role of core versus belt areas in musical imagery, the relation between auditory and motor systems during imagery of music performance, and practical implications of this research.

Animals↗

PubMed2005

Musical stem completion: humming that note.

This study looked at how people store and retrieve tonal music explicitly and implicitly using a production task. Participants completed an implicit task (tune stem completion) followed by an explicit task (cued recall). The tasks were identical except for the instructions at test time. They listened to tunes and were then presented with tune stems from previously heard tunes and novel tunes. For the implicit task, they were asked to sing a note they thought would come next musically. For the explicit task, they were asked to sing the note they remembered as coming next. Experiment 1 found that people correctly completed significantly more old stems than new stems. Experiment 2 investigated the characteristics of music that fuel retrieval by varying a surface feature of the tune (same timbre or different timbre) from study to test and the encoding task (semantic or nonsemantic). Although we did not find that implicit and explicit memory for music were significantly dissociated for levels of processing, we did find that surface features of music affect semanticjudgments and subsequent explicit retrieval.

Analysis of Variance↗

PubMed2004

Behavioral and neural correlates of perceived and imagined musical timbre.

The generality of findings implicating secondary auditory areas in auditory imagery was tested by using a timbre imagery task with fMRI. Another aim was to test whether activity in supplementary motor area (SMA) seen in prior studies might have been related to subvocalization. Participants with moderate musical background were scanned while making similarity judgments about the timbre of heard or imagined musical instrument sounds. The critical control condition was a visual imagery task. The pattern of judgments in perceived and imagined conditions was similar, suggesting that perception and imagery access similar cognitive representations of timbre. As expected, judgments of heard timbres, relative to the visual imagery control, activated primary and secondary auditory areas with some right-sided asymmetry. Timbre imagery also activated secondary auditory areas relative to the visual imagery control, although less strongly, in accord with previous data. Significant overlap was observed in these regions between perceptual and imagery conditions. Because the visual control task resulted in deactivation of auditory areas relative to a silent baseline, we interpret the timbre imagery effect as a reversal of that deactivation. Despite the lack of an obvious subvocalization component to timbre imagery, some activity in SMA was observed, suggesting that SMA may have a more general role in imagery beyond any motor component.

Acoustic Stimulation↗