The involuntary nature of music-evoked autobiographical memories in Alzheimer’s disease

Haj, Mohamad El; Fasotti, Luciano; Allain, Philippe

doi:10.1016/j.concog.2011.12.005

Cited by 167 publications

(158 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…A substantial body of structural and functional neuroimaging work in the healthy brain and in patients with focal brain lesions has delineated distributed cortico-subcortical networks that analyze the dimensions of music [6,12,13]: these networks closely overlap the networks targeted in canonical dementia syndromes [14,15]. However, to date most studies of music in dementia have focused on the interaction of music and memory [16][17][18], preserved abilities in trained musicians developing dementia [16,19,20] and potential benefits of music more widely in dementia [21][22][23][24][25].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Music Perception in Dementia

Golden

Clark

Nicholas

et al. 2016

JAD

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# These authors contributed equally to this work. AbstractDespite much recent interest in music and dementia, music perception has not been widely studied across dementia syndromes using an information processing approach. Here we addressed this issue in a cohort of 30 patients representing major dementia syndromes of typical Alzheimer's disease (AD, n=16), logopenic aphasia (LPA, an Alzheimer variant syndrome; n=5) and progressive nonfluent aphasia (PNFA; n=9) in relation to 19 healthy age-matched individuals. We designed a novel neuropsychological battery to assess perception of musical patterns in the dimensions of pitch and temporal information (requiring detection of notes that deviated from the established pattern based on local or global sequence features) and musical scene analysis (requiring detection of a familiar tune within polyphonic harmony). Performance on these tests was referenced to generic auditory (timbral) deviance detection and recognition of familiar tunes and adjusted for general auditory working memory performance. Relative to healthy controls, patients with AD and LPA had group-level deficits of global pitch (melody contour) processing while patients with PNFA as a group had deficits of local (interval) as well as global pitch processing. There was substantial individual variation within syndromic groups. No specific deficits of musical temporal processing, timbre processing, musical scene analysis or tune recognition were identified. The findings suggest that particular aspects of music perception such as pitch pattern analysis may open a window on the processing of information streams in major dementia syndromes. The potential selectivity of musical deficits for particular dementia syndromes and particular dimensions of processing warrants further systematic investigation.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Music Perception in Dementia

Golden

Clark

Nicholas

et al. 2016

JAD

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“…Involuntary autobiographical memories are frequently retrieved in response to external stimuli, such as sensory experiences, persons, music, and other media content (Berntsen, 1996;El Haj, Fasotti, & Allain, 2012;McDonald, Sarge, Lin, Collier, & Potocki, 2015;Rasmussen, Johannessen, & Berntsen, 2014). Since there are significant differences between voluntary and involuntary memories (Berntsen, 1998;Berntsen & Hall, 2004;Hall et al, 2014;Schlagman & Kvavilashvili, 2008), we selected pictures of famous faces as a comparable cue that would not require voluntary memory retrieval.…”

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confidence: 99%

Music evokes vivid autobiographical memories

Belfi

Karlan

Tranel

2015

Memory

122

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Music is strongly intertwined with memories-for example, hearing a song from the past can transport you back in time, triggering the sights, sounds, and feelings of a specific event. This association between music and vivid autobiographical memory is intuitively apparent, but the idea that music is intimately tied with memories, seemingly more so than other potent memory cues (e.g., familiar faces), has not been empirically tested. Here, we compared memories evoked by music to those evoked by famous faces, predicting that music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs) would be more vivid. Participants listened to 30 songs, viewed 30 faces, and reported on memories that were evoked. Memories were transcribed and coded for vividness as in Levine, B., Svoboda, E., Hay, J. F., Winocur, G., & Moscovitch, M. [2002. Aging and autobiographical memory: Dissociating episodic from semantic retrieval. Psychology and Aging, 17, 677-689]. In support of our hypothesis, MEAMs were more vivid than autobiographical memories evoked by faces. MEAMs contained a greater proportion of internal details and a greater number of perceptual details, while face-evoked memories contained a greater number of external details. Additionally, we identified sex differences in memory vividness: for both stimulus categories, women retrieved more vivid memories than men. The results show that music not only effectively evokes autobiographical memories, but that these memories are more vivid than those evoked by famous faces.

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“…Music can bring out memories and positive emotions in individuals with dementia [28,12,42]. Research indicates that musical memory regions of the brain tend to be relatively spared in Alzheimer's disease [43].…”

Section: Music Activitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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2016

BAOJPM

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The involuntary nature of music-evoked autobiographical memories in Alzheimer’s disease

Cited by 167 publications

References 36 publications

Music Perception in Dementia

Music Perception in Dementia

Music evokes vivid autobiographical memories

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