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Biomedical subjects

Lauren Stewart

Publications and source records attributed to Lauren Stewart.

13 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2006

Congenital amusia.

Explore the source record for details and available documents.

Auditory Perceptual Disorders↗
PubMed2006

Music and the brain: disorders of musical listening.

The study of the brain bases for normal musical listening has advanced greatly in the last 30 years. The evidence from basic and clinical neuroscience suggests that listening to music involves many cognitive components with distinct brain substrates. Using patient cases reported in the literature, we develop an approach for understanding disordered musical listening that is based on the systematic assessment of the perceptual and cognitive analysis of music and its emotional effect. This approach can be applied both to acquired and congenital deficits of musical listening, and to aberrant listening in patients with musical hallucinations. Both the bases for normal musical listening and the clinical assessment of disorders now have a solid grounding in systems neuroscience.

Auditory Perception↗
PubMed2005

Infant learning: music and the baby brain.

When it comes to listening to music, infants literally have a more open mind than their parents. Studies which investigate listening behaviour of babies and adults have shown that, as we learn to discriminate the musical sounds in our own environment, we become less sensitive to those of other cultures.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2005

A neurocognitive approach to music reading.

Music reading offers a unique perspective on the acquisition of a notational system. Many people cannot read music, but a large proportion are motivated to learn. Musical literacy is therefore amenable to studies of acquisition in a way that language literacy is not. The studies reviewed here investigate how musical symbols on the page are decoded into a musical response. The studies address the nature of the mental representations used in music reading, as well as their instantiation within the brain. The results of a musical Stroop paradigm are described, in which musical notation was present but irrelevant for task performance. The presence of musical notation produced systematic effects on reaction time, demonstrating that reading of the written note, like the written word, is obligatory for those who are musically literate. Spatial interference tasks are also described that suggest that music reading, at least for the pianist, can be characterized as a set of vertical to horizontal mappings. These behavioral findings are mirrored by the results of an fMRI training study in which musically untrained adults were taught to read music and play piano keyboard over a period of three months. Specific learning-related changes were seen in the superior parietal cortex and fusiform gyrus, for melody reading and rhythm reading, respectively. These changes are suggested to correspond to the acquisition of processes that deal with the extraction of spatial and featural properties of notation, respectively.

Cognition↗
PubMed2004

Reading music modifies spatial mapping in pianists.

We used a novel musical Stroop task to demonstrate that musical notation is automatically processed in trained pianists. Numbers were superimposed onto musical notes, and participants played five-note sequences by mapping from numbers to fingers instead of from notes to fingers. Pianists' reaction times were significantly affected by the congruence of the note/number pairing. Nonmusicians were unaffected. In a nonmusical analogue of the task, pianists and nonmusicians showed a qualitative difference on performance of a vertical-to-horizontal stimulus-response mapping task. Pianists were faster when stimuli specifying a leftward response were presented in vertically lower locations and stimuli specifying a rightward response were presented in vertically higher locations. Nonmusicians showed the reverse pattern. No group differences were found on a task that required horizontal-to-horizontal mappings. We suggest that, as a result of learning to read and play keyboard music, pianists acquire vertical-to-horizontal visuomotor mappings that generalize outside the musical context.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2003

In utero development of central ANG-stimulated pressor response and hypothalamic fos expression.

Central renin-angiotensin system (RAS) is as important as the peripheral RAS in the control of the cardiovascular homeostasis in the adult. However, previous fetal studies on angiotensin II (ANG II)-induced cardiovascular responses focused exclusively on the peripheral side. Thus, few data exist characterizing the in utero development of central angiotensin-mediated pressor responses. The present study determined cardiovascular responses to central application of ANG II in the chronically prepared near-term ovine fetus, and determined the action sites marked by c-fos expression in the fetal hypothalamus following intracerebroventricular (icv) injection of ANG II in utero. ANG II significantly increased fetal systolic, diastolic, and mean arterial pressure (MAP) within 5 min after injection of this peptide into the brain. Adjusted fetal MAP against amniotic pressure was also increased by icv ANG II, associated with increased c-fos in the central putative cardiovascular area--the paraventricular nuclei (PVN). Application of ANG II also induced intense c-fos expression in the supraoptic nuclei (SON), accompanied by a significant increase of fetal plasma vasopressin (AVP) levels, while maternal blood pressure (BP) and plasma AVP concentration were not changed. These results indicate that the central ANG II-mediated pressor response is functional at the last third of gestation, acting at the sites consistent with the cardiovascular neural network in the hypothalamus.

Angiotensin II↗
PubMed2003

Brain changes after learning to read and play music.

Musically naive participants were scanned before and after a period of 15 weeks during which they were taught to read music and play the keyboard. When participants played melodies from musical notation after training, activation was seen in a cluster of voxels within the bilateral superior parietal cortex. A subset of these voxels were activated in a second experiment in which musical notation was present, but irrelevant for task performance. These activations suggest that music reading involves the automatic sensorimotor translation of a spatial code (written music) into a series of motor responses (keypresses).

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Becoming a pianist. An fMRI study of musical literacy acquisition.

Musically naïve subjects were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) before and after they had been taught to read music and play keyboard. When subjects played melodies from musical notation after training, activation was seen in a cluster of voxels within the right superior parietal cortex consistent with the view that music reading involves spatial sensorimotor mapping.

Brain Mapping↗
PubMed2002

Congenital amusia: all the songs sound the same.

Recent evidence from individuals born with a profound musical impairment suggests that the ability to process pitch information is normally present from birth. This finding supports the idea that the perception and appreciation of music, both of which critically depend on pitch processing, have a biological basis in the brain.

Auditory Diseases, Central↗