Neuronal Correlates of Perception, Imagery, and Memory for Familiar Tunes

We used fMRI to investigate the neuronal correlates of encoding and recognizing heard and imagined melodies. Ten participants were shown lyrics of familiar verbal tunes; they either heard the tune along with the lyrics, or they had to imagine it. In a subsequent surprise recognition test, they had to identify the titles of tunes that they had heard or imagined earlier. The functional data showed substantial overlap during melody perception and imagery, including secondary auditory areas. During imagery compared with perception, an extended network including pFC, SMA, intraparietal sulcus, and cerebellum showed increased activity, in line with the increased processing demands of imagery. Functional connectivity of anterior right temporal cortex with frontal areas was increased during imagery compared with perception, indicating that these areas form an imagery-related network. Activity in right superior temporal gyrus and pFC was correlated with the subjective rating of imagery vividness. Similar to the encoding phase, the recognition task recruited overlapping areas, including inferior frontal cortex associated with memory retrieval, as well as left middle temporal gyrus. The results present new evidence for the cortical network underlying goal-directed auditory imagery, with a prominent role of the right pFC both for the subjective impression of imagery vividness and for on-line mental monitoring of imagery-related activity in auditory areas.

Melody recognition at fast and slow tempos: Effects of age, experience, and familiarity

Eighty-one listeners defined by three age ranges (18–30, 31–59, and over 60 years) and three levels of musical experience performed an immediate recognition task requiring the detection of alterations in melodies. On each trial, a brief melody was presented, followed 5 sec later by a test stimulus that either was identical to the target or had two pitches changed, for a same–different judgment. Each melody pair was presented at 0.6 note/sec, 3.0 notes/sec, or 6.0 notes/sec. Performance was better with familiar melodies than with unfamiliar melodies. Overall performance declined slightly with age and improved substantially with increasing experience, in agreement with earlier results in an identification task. Tempo affected performance on familiar tunes (moderate was best), but not on unfamiliar tunes. We discuss these results in terms of theories of dynamic attending, cognitive slowing, and working memory in aging.

Risk Judgment in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Testing a Dual-Systems Account

Dual-systems theorists posit distinct modes of reasoning. The intuition system reasons automatically and its processes are unavailable to conscious introspection. The deliberation system reasons effortfully while its processes recruit working memory. The current paper extends the application of such theories to the study of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Patients with OCD often retain insight into their irrationality, implying dissociable systems of thought: intuition produces obsessions and fears that deliberation observes and attempts (vainly) to inhibit. To test the notion that dual-systems theory can adequately describe OCD, we obtained speeded and unspeeded risk judgments from OCD patients and non-anxious controls in order to quantify the differential effects of intuitive and deliberative reasoning. As predicted, patients deemed negative events to be more likely than controls. Patients also took more time in producing judgments than controls. Furthermore, when forced to respond quickly patients' judgments were more affected than controls'. Although patients did attenuate judgments when given additional time, their estimates never reached the levels of controls'. We infer from these data that patients have genuine difficulty inhibiting their intuitive cognitive system. Our dual-systems perspective is compatible with current theories of the disorder. Similar behavioral tests may prove helpful in better understanding related anxiety disorders. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Memory biases in left vs. 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 Ss, 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.

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.

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 offamiliar 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 ofvarious 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.

Musical Expertise and Melodic Structure in Memory for Musical Notation

Two experiments plus a pilot investigated the role of melodic structure on short-term memory for musical notation by musicians and nonmusicians. In the pilot experiment, visually similar melodies that had been rated as either "good" or "bad" were presented briefly, followed by a 15-sec retention interval and then recall. Musicians remembered good melodies better than they remembered bad ones: nonmusicians did not distinguish between them. In the second experiment, good, bad, and random melodies were briefly presented, followed by immediate recall. The advantage of musicians over nonmusicians decreased as the melody type progressed from good to bad to random. In the third experiment, musicians and nonmusicians divided the stimulus melodies into groups. For each melody, the consistency of grouping was correlated with memory performance in the first two experiments. Evidence was found for use of musical groupings by musicians and for use of a simple visual strategy by nonmusicians. The nature of these musical groupings and how they may be learned are considered. The relation of this work to other studies of comprehension of symbolic diagrams is also discussed.