Neural correlates of recognition and naming of musical instruments.

Abstract

The findings extend our understanding of how musical instruments are processed at neural system level, and elucidate factors that may explain why brain damage may or may not produce anomia or agnosia for musical instruments. Our findings also help inform broader understanding of category-related knowledge mapping in the brain, as musical instruments possess several characteristics that are similar to various other categories of items: They are inanimate and highly manipulable (similar to tools), produce characteristic sounds (similar to animals), and require fine-grained visual differentiation between each other (similar to people). (PsycINFO Database Record

Anomia for musical entities

“…Further evidence that sensorimotor regions are critical for naming musical instruments comes from our findings that damage to the STG is associated with impaired instrument naming (Belfi, Bruss, et al, 2016; H. Damasio et al, 2004).…”

“…Although associated with LTP damage, musical instruments were also associated with a broader network of left hemisphere regions, including motor and sensory regions (Belfi, Bruss, et al, 2016). Naming instruments may require more perceptual analysis than other categories of items.…”

“…That is, we do not know whether impairments in naming melodies (unique) and instruments (non-unique) can be dissociated. Below we outline our prior experiment on musical instrument naming, and in addition to this summary, we directly compare the performance of patients who completed both the melody naming (Belfi & Tranel, 2014) and instrument naming (Belfi, Bruss, Karlan, Abel, & Tranel, 2016) tasks to assess this question.…”

“… A) Examples of musical instrument stimuli used in Belfi et al, (2016) and Damasio et al (2004). B) Subtraction map depicting impairments on musical instrument naming from Damasio et al (2004).…”

“…In this method, lesion overlap maps are created for impaired and unimpaired groups, and the overlap volume for the unimpaired group is subtracted from the overlap volume for the impaired group, on a voxel-by-voxel basis. C) Subtraction map depicting impairments on musical instrument naming from Belfi et al (2016). This map was created using the proportional MAP-3 (PM3) method described in the text (see “Neuroanatomical analysis”).…”