Biomedical subjects

Isabelle Peretz

Publications and source records attributed to Isabelle Peretz.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Amygdala damage impairs emotion recognition from music.

The role of the amygdala in recognition of danger is well established for visual stimuli such as faces. A similar role in another class of emotionally potent stimuli -- music -- has been recently suggested by the study of epileptic patients with unilateral resection of the anteromedian part of the temporal lobe [Gosselin, N., Peretz, I., Noulhiane, M., Hasboun, D., Beckett, C., & Baulac, M., et al. (2005). Impaired recognition of scary music following unilateral temporal lobe excision. Brain, 128(Pt 3), 628-640]. The goal of the present study was to assess the specific role of the amygdala in the recognition of fear from music. To this aim, we investigated a rare subject, S.M., who has complete bilateral damage relatively restricted to the amygdala and not encompassing other sectors of the temporal lobe. In Experiment 1, S.M. and four matched controls were asked to rate the intensity of fear, peacefulness, happiness, and sadness from computer-generated instrumental music purposely created to express those emotions. Subjects also rated the arousal and valence of each musical stimulus. An error detection task assessed basic auditory perceptual function. S.M. performed normally in this perceptual task, but was selectively impaired in the recognition of scary and sad music. In contrast, her recognition of happy music was normal. Furthermore, S.M. judged the scary music to be less arousing and the peaceful music less relaxing than did the controls. Overall, the pattern of impairment in S.M. is similar to that previously reported in patients with unilateral anteromedial temporal lobe damage. S.M.'s impaired emotional judgments occur in the face of otherwise intact processing of musical features that are emotionally determinant. The use of tempo and mode cues in distinguishing happy from sad music was also spared in S.M. Thus, the amygdala appears to be necessary for emotional processing of music rather than the perceptual processing itself.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

Musical scale properties are automatically processed in the human auditory cortex.

While listening to music, we immediately detect 'wrong' tones that do not match our expectations based on the prior context. This study aimed to determine whether such expectations can occur preattentively, as indexed by event-related potentials (ERPs), and whether these are modulated by attentional processes. To this end, we recorded ERPs in nonmusicians while they were presented with unfamiliar melodies, containing either a pitch deviating from the equal-tempered chromatic scale (out-of-tune) or a pitch deviating from the diatonic scale (out-of-key). ERPs were recorded in a passive experiment in which subjects were distracted from the sounds and in an active experiment in which they were judging how incongruous each melody was. In both the experiments, pitch incongruities elicited an early frontal negativity that was not modulated by attentional focus. This early negativity, closely corresponding to the mismatch negativity (MMN) of the ERPs, was mainly originated in the auditory cortex and occurred in response to both pitch violations but with larger amplitude for the more salient out-of-tune pitch than the less salient out-of-key pitch. Attentional processes leading to the conscious access of musical scale information were indexed by the late parietal positivity (resembling the P600 of the ERPs) elicited in response to both incongruous pitches in the active experiment only. Our results indicate that the relational properties of the musical scale are quickly and automatically extracted by the auditory cortex even before the intervention of focused attention.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2006

Emotional responses to unpleasant music correlates with damage to the parahippocampal cortex.

Music is typically a pleasurable experience. But under certain circumstances, music can also be unpleasant, for example, when a young child randomly hits piano keys. Such unpleasant musical experiences have been shown to activate a network of brain structures involved in emotion, mostly located in the medial temporal lobe: the parahippocampal gyrus, amygdala, hippocampus and temporal pole. However, the differential roles of these regions remain largely unknown. In this study, pleasant and unpleasant music was presented to 17 patients with variable excisions of the medial temporal lobe, as well as to 19 matched controls. The pleasant music corresponded to happy and sad selections taken from the classical instrumental repertoire; the unpleasant music was the dissonant arrangement of the same selections. Only patients with substantial resections of the left or right parahippocampal cortex (PHC) gave highly abnormal judgements to dissonant music; they rated dissonant music as slightly pleasant while controls found it unpleasant. This indifference to dissonance was correlated with the remaining volume in the PHC, but was unrelated to the volume of the surrounding structures. The impairment was specific: the same patients judged consonant music to be pleasant, and were able to judge music as happy or sad. Furthermore, this lack of responsiveness to unpleasantness was not due to a perceptual disorder, because all patients were able to detect intentional errors in the musical excerpts. Moreover, the impairment differed from that induced by amygdala damage alone. These findings are consistent with a two-dimensional model of defensive responses to aversive stimuli, in which the PHC and the amygdala subserve different roles.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

Making non-fluent aphasics speak: sing along!

A classic observation in neurology is that aphasics can sing words they cannot pronounce otherwise. To further assess this claim, we investigated the production of sung and spoken utterances in eight brain-damaged patients suffering from a variety of speech disorders as a consequence of a left-hemisphere lesion. In Experiment 1, the patients were tested in the repetition and recall of words and notes of familiar material. Lyrics of familiar songs, as well as words of proverbs and prayers, were not better pronounced in singing than in speaking. Notes were better produced than words. In Experiment 2, the aphasic patients repeated and recalled lyrics from novel songs. Again, they did not produce more words in singing than in speaking. In Experiment 3, when allowed to sing or speak along with an auditory model while learning novel songs, aphasics repeated and recalled more words when singing than when speaking. Reduced speed or shadowing cannot account for this advantage of singing along over speaking in unison. The results suggest that singing in synchrony with an auditory model--choral singing--is more effective than choral speech, at least in French, in improving word intelligibility because choral singing may entrain more than one auditory-vocal interface. Thus, choral singing appears to be an effective means of speech therapy.

Adult↗

PubMed2006

Morphometry of the amusic brain: a two-site study.

Congenital amusia (or tone deafness) is a lifelong disability that prevents otherwise normal-functioning individuals from developing basic musical skills. Behavioural evidence indicates that congenital amusia is due to a severe deficit in pitch processing, but very little is known about the neural correlates of this condition. The objective of the present study was to investigate the structural neural correlates of congenital amusia. To this aim, voxel-based morphometry was used to detect brain anatomical differences in amusic individuals relative to musically intact controls, by analysing T1-weighted magnetic resonance images from two independent samples of subjects. The results were consistent across samples in highlighting a reduction in white matter concentration in the right inferior frontal gyrus of amusic individuals. This anatomical anomaly was correlated with performance on pitch-based musical tasks. The results are consistent with neuroimaging findings implicating right inferior frontal regions in musical pitch encoding and melodic pitch memory. We conceive the present results as a consequence of an impoverished communication in a right-hemisphere-based network involving the inferior frontal cortex and the right auditory cortex. Moreover, the data point to the integrity of white matter tracts in right frontal brain areas as being key in acquiring normal musical competence.

Auditory Perceptual Disorders↗

PubMed2006

The nature of music from a biological perspective.

Music, as language, is a universal human trait. Throughout human history and across all cultures, people have produced and enjoyed music. Despite its ubiquity, the musical capacity is rarely studied as a biological function. Music is typically viewed as a cultural invention. In this paper, the evidence bearing on the biological perspective of the musical capacity is reviewed. Related issues, such as domain-specificity, innateness, and brain localization, are addressed in an attempt to offer a unified conceptual basis for the study of music processing. This scheme should facilitate the study of the biological foundations of music by bringing together the fields of genetics, developmental and comparative research, neurosciences, and musicology.

Auditory Perception↗

PubMed2005

Differentiation of classical music requires little learning but rhythm.

Detecting distinctions between the styles of classical music (e.g. Baroque and Romantic) is often viewed as the privilege of musicians. However, this elite perspective underestimates the abilities of non-musicians. We report that Western musicians and non-musicians, and non-Westerners (i.e. Chinese participants) rated pairs of excerpts presented auditorily as more similar as their compositional styles were closer in history. Moreover, the styles were considered by all participants as more different when presented in historical order, the older style preceding the more recent style (e.g. Baroque followed by Romantic), than the reverse (e.g. Romantic followed by Baroque). This historical distance effect appears related to rhythm (or temporal variability).

Adult↗

PubMed2005

Impaired recognition of scary music following unilateral temporal lobe excision.

Music constitutes an ideal means to create a sense of suspense in films. However, there has been minimal investigation into the underlying cerebral organization for perceiving danger created by music. In comparison, the amygdala's role in recognition of fear in non-musical contexts has been well established. The present study sought to fill this gap in exploring how patients with amygdala resection recognize emotional expression in music. To this aim, we tested 16 patients with left (LTR; n = 8) or right (RTR; n = 8) medial temporal resection (including amygdala) for the relief of medically intractable seizures and 16 matched controls in an emotion recognition task involving instrumental music. The musical selections were purposely created to induce fear, peacefulness, happiness and sadness. Participants were asked to rate to what extent each musical passage expressed these four emotions on 10-point scales. In order to check for the presence of a perceptual problem, the same musical selections were presented to the participants in an error detection task. None of the patients was found to perform below controls in the perceptual task. In contrast, both LTR and RTR patients were found to be impaired in the recognition of scary music. Recognition of happy and sad music was normal. These findings suggest that the anteromedial temporal lobe (including the amygdala) plays a role in the recognition of danger in a musical context.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2005

Abnormal electrical brain responses to pitch in congenital amusia.

Congenital amusia is a lifelong disability that prevents afflicted individuals from enjoying music as ordinary people do. The deficit is limited to music and cannot be explained by prior brain lesion, hearing loss, or any cognitive or socio-affective disturbance. Recent behavioral results suggest that this disorder is critically dependent on fine-grained pitch discrimination. Here, we present novel electrophysiological evidence that this disorder can be traced down to a right-lateralized N2-P3 response elicited by pitch changes. This abnormal brain response begins as early as 200 milliseconds after tone onset and may serve as a marker of an anomaly in music acquisition.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2005

Brain organization for music processing.

Research on how the brain processes music is emerging as a rich and stimulating area of investigation of perception, memory, emotion, and performance. Results emanating from both lesion studies and neuroimaging techniques are reviewed and integrated for each of these musical functions. We focus our attention on the common core of musical abilities shared by musicians and nonmusicians alike. Hence, the effect of musical training on brain plasticity is examined in a separate section, after a review of the available data regarding music playing and reading skills that are typically cultivated by musicians. Finally, we address a currently debated issue regarding the putative existence of music-specific neural networks. Unfortunately, due to scarcity of research on the macrostructure of music organization and on cultural differences, the musical material under focus is at the level of the musical phrase, as typically used in Western popular music.

Affect↗

PubMed2005

Quantifying tone deafness in the general population.

Many people reach adulthood without acquiring significant music performance skills (singing or instrumental playing). A substantial proportion of these adults consider that this has come about because they are "not musical." Some of these people may be "true" congenital amusics, characterized by specific and substantial anomalies in the processing of musical pitch and rhythm sequences, while at the same time displaying normal processing of speech and language. It is likely, however, that many adults who believe that they are unmusical are neurologically normal. We could call these adults "false" amusics. Acquisition of musical competence has multiple personal, social, and environmental precursors. Deficiencies in these areas may lead to lack of musical achievement, despite the fact that an individual possesses the necessary underlying capacities. Adults may therefore self-define as "unmusical" or "tone-deaf" for reasons unconnected to any underlying anomaly. This paper reports on two linked research studies. The first is an interview study with adults defining themselves as tone-deaf or unmusical. The interview schedule was designed to discover what criteria are being used in their self-definitions. Preliminary results suggest that performance criteria (e.g., judging oneself as unable to sing) play a major role, even for people who claim and demonstrate no perceptual deficits. The second study reports progress on the development of new subtests for a revised version of the Montreal Battery for the Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA, Peretz et al., 2003). This currently contains six tests that allow for the assessment of melodic perception: contour, intervals, scale, rhythm, meter, and recognition memory. The MBEA does not assess two capacities that are generally accepted as central to normal music cognition: harmony and emotion. The development and norming of the emotion subtest will be described. When completed, the MBEA(R) will form a robust screening device for use with the general population, whose purpose is to discriminate "true" from "false" amusics. Such discrimination is essential to achieve a better understanding of the variety of causes of low musical achievement.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2005

Musical difficulties are rare: a study of "tone deafness" among university students.

This study was concerned with self-reported "tone deafness" and its possible relationship to congenital amusia. Nearly 17% of over 2,000 first-year psychology students at Queen's University self-reported tone deafness. Two hundred students were recruited from this pool of students, comprising 100 who reported tone deafness and 100 who reported that they were not tone-deaf (NTD). The study contained two parts. In part 1, participants completed the six tests of the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA) developed by Peretz and collaborators. In part 2, participants completed an extensive questionnaire designed to elicit details about musical experiences, abilities, training, and interests. Twenty-eight questionnaire items allowing a quantitative response were subjected to factor analysis. Four orthogonal components emerged from the analysis. The components reflected self-report of (1) vocal production, (2) music instruction, (3) listening attitudes, and (4) childhood memories of musical environment. Results for each of the MBEA tests and composite scores for all tests were regressed on participants' factor scores. The best and significant predictors of the MBEA scores were factor I and factor II, followed by factor III. Factor scores accounted for a higher percentage of the variance in MBEA composite test results (27%) than the self-report of tone deafness alone (7%). The musical difficulties revealed by the MBEA test results for some participants warrant further attention and study. However, an encouraging conclusion from the MBEA results is that many individuals who consider themselves "tone-deaf" may not, in fact, have perceptual difficulties, and these individuals should be supported in any of their efforts to proceed with music enjoyment and instruction.

Adolescent↗

PubMed2005

Effects of prior exposure on music liking and recognition in patients with temporal lobe lesions.

Prior exposure to music typically increases liking. This manifestation of implicit memory can be dissociated from explicit memory recognition. To examine the contribution of the medial temporal lobe to musical preference and recognition, we tested patients with either left (LTL) or right (RTL) temporal lobe lesions as well as normal control (NC) participants using the procedure of Peretz et al. The results in the affect task showed that NC and LTL participants preferred the studied over nonstudied melodies, thereby demonstrating an implicit exposure effect on liking judgments, whereas RTL patients failed to exhibit this effect. Explicit recognition was impaired in both LTL and RTL patients as compared to NC participants. On the basis of these findings, we suggest that RTL structures play a critical role in the formation of melody representations that support both priming and memory recognition, whereas LTL structures are more involved in the explicit retrieval of melodies. Furthermore, we were able to test an amnesic patient (PC) with bilateral lesions of the temporal lobe. In this case, the exposure effect on liking was also absent. However, repeated exposure to melodies was found to enhance both liking and recognition judgments. This remarkable sparing of memory observed through melody repetition suggests that extensive exposure may assist both implicit and explicit memory in the presence of global amnesia.

Adult↗

PubMed2004

Characterization of deficits in pitch perception underlying 'tone deafness'.

Congenital amusia is a disorder characterized by life-long, selective deficits in the perception of music. This study examined pitch-perception abilities in a group of 10 adults with this disorder. Tests were administered that assessed fine-grained pitch perception by determining thresholds both for the detection of continuous and segmented pitch changes, and for the recognition of pitch direction. Tests were also administered that assessed the perception of more complex pitch patterns, using pitch-sequence comparison tasks. In addition, the perceptual organization of pitch was also examined, using stream segregation tasks that assess the assignment of sounds differing in pitch to one or two distinct perceptual sources. In comparison with 10 control subjects, it was found that the participants with congenital amusia exhibited deficits both at the level of detecting fine-grained differences in pitch, and at the level of perceiving patterns in pitch. In contrast, no abnormalities were identified in the perceptual organization of pitch. The pitch deficits identified are able to account for the music perception difficulties in this disorder, and implicate deficient cortical processing.

Acoustic Stimulation↗

PubMed2004

Brains that are out of tune but in time.

It is estimated that about 4% of the general population may have amusia (or tone deafness). Congenital amusia is a lifelong disability for processing music despite normal intellectual, memory, and language skills. Here we present evidence that the disorder stems from a deficit in fine-grained pitch perception. Amusic and control adults were presented with monotonic and isochronous sequences of five tones (i.e., constant pitch and intertone interval). They were required to detect when the fourth tone was displaced in pitch or time. All amusic participants were impaired in detecting the pitch changes, and showed no sign of improvement with practice. In contrast, they detected time changes as well as control adults and exhibited similar improvements with practice. Thus, the degraded pitch perception seen in the amusic individuals cannot be ascribed to nonspecific problems with the task or to poor hearing in general. Rather, the data point to the presence of a congenital neural anomaly that selectively impairs pitch processing.

Auditory Perceptual Disorders↗

PubMed2004

Two-way interactions between music and language: evidence from priming recognition of tune and lyrics in familiar songs.

A priming technique was employed to study the relations between melody and lyrics in song memory. The procedure involved the auditory presentation of a prime and a target taken from the same song, or from unrelated but equally familiar songs. To promote access to memory representations of songs, we varied the format of primes and targets, which were either spoken or sung, using the syllable /1a/. In each of the four experiments, a prime taken from the same song as the target facilitated target recognition, independently of the format in which it occurred. The facilitation effects were also found in conditions close to masked priming because prime recognizability was very low, as assessed in Experiment 1 by d' measures. Above all, backward priming effects were observed in Experiments 2, 3, and 4, where song order was reversed in the prime-target sequence, suggesting that words and tones of songs are not connected by strict temporal contingencies. Rather, the results indicate that, in song memory, text and tune are related by tight connections that are bidirectional and automatically activated by relatively abstract information. Rhythmic similarity between linguistic stress pattern and musical meter might account for these priming effects.

Adult↗

PubMed2003

Revisiting the dissociation between singing and speaking in expressive aphasia.

We investigated the production of sung and spoken utterances in a non-fluent patient, C.C., who had a severe expressive aphasia following a right-hemisphere stroke, but whose language comprehension and memory were relatively preserved. In experiment 1, C.C. repeated familiar song excerpts under four different conditions: spoken lyrics, sung lyrics on original melody, lyrics sung on new but familiar melody and melody sung to a neutral syllable "la". In experiment 2, C.C. repeated novel song excerpts under three different conditions: spoken lyrics, sung lyrics and sung-to-la melody. The mean number of words produced under the spoken and sung conditions did not differ significantly in either experiment. The mean number of notes produced was not different either in the sung-to-la and sung conditions, but was higher than the words produced, hence showing a dissociation between C.C.'s musical and verbal productions. Therefore, our findings do not support the claim that singing helps word production in non-fluent aphasic patients. Rather, they are consistent with the idea that verbal production, be it sung or spoken, result from the operation of same mechanisms.

Aphasia, Broca↗

PubMed2003

Enhanced pitch sensitivity in individuals with autism: a signal detection analysis.

Past research has shown a superiority of participants with high-functioning autism over comparison groups in memorizing picture-pitch associations and in detecting pitch changes in melodies. A subset of individuals with autism, known as "musical savants," is also known to possess absolute pitch. This superiority might be due to an abnormally high sensitivity to fine-grained pitch differences in sounds. To test this hypothesis, psychoacoustic tasks were devised so as to use a signal detection methodology. Participants were all musically untrained and were divided into a group of 12 high-functioning individuals with autism and a group of 12 normally developing individuals. Their task was to judge the pitch of pure tones in a "same-different" discrimination task and in a "high-low" categorization task. In both tasks, the obtained psychometric functions revealed higher pitch sensitivity for subjects with autism, with a more pronounced advantage over control participants in the categorization task. These findings confirm that pitch processing is enhanced in "high-functioning" autism. Superior performance in pitch discrimination and categorization extends previous findings of enhanced visual performance to the auditory domain. Thus, and as predicted by the enhanced perceptual functioning model for peaks of ability in autism (Mottron & Burack, 2001), autistic individuals outperform typically developing population in a variety of low-level perceptual tasks.

Adolescent↗