When the Wedding March becomes sad: Semantic memory impairment for music in the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia.

When the Wedding March becomes sad: Semantic memory impairment for music in the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia. Neurocase. 2016 Nov 16;:1-10 Authors: Macoir J, Berubé-Lalancette S, Wilson MA, Laforce R, Hudon C, Gravel P, Potvin O, Duchesne S, Monetta L Abstract Music can induce particular emotions and activate semantic knowledge. In the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (svPPA), semantic memory is impaired as a result of anterior temporal lobe (ATL) atrophy. Semantics is responsible for the encoding and retrieval of factual knowledge about music, including associative and emotional attributes. In the present study, we report the performance of two individuals with svPPA in three experiments. NG with bilateral ATL atrophy and ND with atrophy largely restricted to the left ATL. Experiment 1 assessed the recognition of musical excerpts and both patients were unimpaired. Experiment 2 studied the emotions conveyed by music and only NG showed impaired performance. Experiment 3 tested the association of semantic concepts to musical excerpts and both patients were impaired. These results suggest that the right ATL seems essential for the recognition of emotions conveyed by music and that the left ATL is involved in binding music to semantics. They are in line with the notion that the ATLs are devoted to the binding of different modality-specific properties and suggest that they are also differentially involve...
Source: Neurocase - Category: Neurology Authors: Tags: Neurocase Source Type: research
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