Individuals with congenital amusia remember music they like.

Music is better recognized when it is liked. Does this association remain evident when music perception and memory are severely impaired, as in congenital amusia? We tested 11 amusic and 11 matched control participants, asking whether liking of a musical excerpt influences subsequent recognition. In an initial exposure phase, participants-unaware that their recognition would be tested subsequently-listened to 24 musical excerpts and judged how much they liked each excerpt. In the test phase that followed, participants rated whether they recognized the previously heard excerpts, which were intermixed with an equal number of foils matched for mode, tempo, and musical genre. As expected, recognition was in general impaired for amusic participants compared with control participants. For both groups, however, recognition was better for excerpts that were liked, and the liking enhancement did not differ between groups. These results contribute to a growing body of research that examines the complex interplay between emotions and cognitive processes. More specifically, they extend previous findings related to amusics' impairments to a new memory paradigm and suggest that (1) amusic individuals are sensitive to an aesthetic and subjective dimension of the music-listening experience, and (2) emotions can support memory processes even in a population with impaired music perception and memory.

Tonal structures benefit short-term memory for real music: Evidence from non-musicians and individuals with congenital amusia.

Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder of music processing, which includes impaired pitch memory, associated to abnormalities in the right fronto-temporal network. Previous research has shown that tonal structures (as defined by the Western musical system) improve short-term memory performance for short tone sequences (in comparison to atonal versions) in non-musician listeners, but the tonal structures only benefited response times in amusic individuals. We here tested the potential benefit of tonal structures for short-term memory with more complex musical material. Congenital amusics and their matched non-musician controls were required to indicate whether two excerpts were the same or different. Results confirmed impaired performance of amusic individuals in this short-term memory task. However, most importantly, both groups of participants showed better memory performance for tonal material than for atonal material. These results revealed that even amusics' impaired short-term memory for pitch shows classical characteristics of short-term memory, that is the mnemonic benefit of structure in the to-be-memorized material. The findings show that amusic individuals have acquired some implicit knowledge of regularities of their culture, allowing for implicit processing of tonal structures, which benefits to memory even for complex material.

Auditory and visual short-term memory: influence of material type, contour, and musical expertise.

Short-term memory has mostly been investigated with verbal or visuospatial stimuli and less so with other categories of stimuli. Moreover, the influence of sensory modality has been explored almost solely in the verbal domain. The present study compared visual and auditory short-term memory for different types of materials, aiming to understand whether sensory modality and material type can influence short-term memory performance. Furthermore, we aimed to assess if music expertise can modulate memory performance, as previous research has reported better auditory memory (and to some extent, visual memory), and better auditory contour recognition for musicians than non-musicians. To do so, we adapted the same recognition paradigm (delayed-matching to sample) across different types of stimuli. In each trial, participants (musicians and non-musicians) were presented with two sequences of events, separated by a silent delay, and had to indicate whether the two sequences were identical or different. The performance was compared for auditory and visual materials belonging to three different categories: (1) verbal (i.e., syllables); (2) nonverbal (i.e., that could not be easily denominated) with contour (based on loudness or luminance variations); and (3) nonverbal without contour (pink noise sequences or kanji letters sequences). Contour and no-contour conditions referred to whether the sequence can entail (or not) a contour (i.e., a pattern of up and down changes) based on non-pitch features. Results revealed a selective advantage of musicians for auditory no-contour stimuli and for contour stimuli (both visual and auditory), suggesting that musical expertise is associated with specific short-term memory advantages in domains close to the trained domain, also extending cross-modally when stimuli have contour information. Moreover, our results suggest a role of encoding strategies (i.e., how the material is represented mentally during the task) for short-term-memory performance.

Domestic tourists' experience in protected natural parks: A new trend in pandemic crisis?

Since December 2019, the Covid-19 pandemic crisis has led to profound changes around the world with a lot of interdictions or constraints to travel outside one's own country. One of the major consequences has been the development of proximity tourism in outdoor spaces less conducive to the spread of the virus. From a study preceding this pandemic, this article seeks to better understand the experiences lived by domestic tourists when they visited protected natural parks in their country. Beyond the health risks, it analyses the dimensions and the influences of experiences lived in these parks by French domestic tourists (n = 500) using Pine and Gilmore's 4Es model (1999). From a literature on the tourism experiences for domestic tourists adapted to natural parks and a critical review on the use and validation of Oh et al.'s scale (2007) in tourism, a structural equation model and a nested SEM show the positive relationship between three dimensions of the 4Es on the arousal and memory outcomes. Theoretically and methodologically speaking, this study extends the 4Es model in the direction of low arousal and mundane experiences for domestic tourists in protected natural parks, and questions Oh, Fiore, and Jeoung (2007) scale through the number of items, the use of EFA and the removal of the aesthetics dimension. This research can help managers of protected natural parks adapt their domestic tourists' experience offer during health crisis by implementing specific marketing strategies for low arousal and mundane experiences with more outdoor activities and digital services.

Musical emotions in congenital amusia: Impaired recognition, but preserved emotional intensity.

OBJECTIVE: To further our understanding of the role of perceptual processes in musical emotions, we investigated individuals with congenital amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder that alters pitch processing. METHOD: Amusic and matched control participants were studied for emotion recognition and emotion intensity ratings of both musical excerpts and faces. RESULTS: Emotion recognition was found to be impaired in amusic participants relative to controls for the musical stimuli only. This impairment suggests that perceptual deficits in music processing reduce amusics' access to a verbal and conscious representation of musical emotions. Nevertheless, amusics' performance for emotion recognition was above chance level, and multidimensional scaling (MDS) analyses revealed that their categorization of musical pieces was based on similar representation spaces of emotions as for control participants. The emotion intensity ratings, nonverbal and possibly more implicit than the categorization task, seemed to be intact in amusic participants. CONCLUSIONS: These findings reveal that pitch deficits can hinder the recognition of emotions conveyed by musical pieces, while also highlighting the (at least partial) dissociation between emotion recognition and emotion intensity evaluation. Our study thus sheds light on the complex interactions between perceptual and emotional networks in the brain, by showing that impaired central auditory processing partially alters musical emotion processing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Verbal and musical short-term memory: Variety of auditory disorders after stroke.

Auditory cognitive deficits after stroke may concern language and/or music processing, resulting in aphasia and/or amusia. The aim of the present study was to assess the potential deficits of auditory short-term memory for verbal and musical material after stroke and their underlying cerebral correlates with a Voxel-based Lesion Symptom Mapping approach (VLSM). Patients with an ischemic stroke in the right (N=10) or left (N=10) middle cerebral artery territory and matched control participants (N=14) were tested with a detailed neuropsychological assessment including global cognitive functions, music perception and language tasks. All participants then performed verbal and musical auditory short-term memory (STM) tasks that were implemented in the same way for both materials. Participants had to indicate whether series of four words or four tones presented in pairs, were the same or different. To detect domain-general STM deficits, they also had to perform a visual STM task. Behavioral results showed that patients had lower performance for the STM tasks in comparison with control participants, regardless of the material (words, tones, visual) and the lesion side. The individual patient data showed a double dissociation between some patients exhibiting verbal deficits without musical deficits or the reverse. Exploratory VLSM analyses suggested that dorsal pathways are involved in verbal (phonetic), musical (melodic), and visual STM, while the ventral auditory pathway is involved in musical STM.

Understanding the consequences of victory amongst sport spectators: The mediating role of BIRGing.

Prior work on the relationships between team identification and spectators' reactions to one's team victory has largely neglected the potential effects of mediating variables. In this research, we proposed that the process of Basking in Reflected Glory [BIRGing - the tendency to reduce the distance between oneself and one's team; Cialdini, R. B., Bordon, R. J., Thorne, A., Walker, M. R., Freeman, S., & Sloan, L. R. (1976). Basking in reflected glory: Three (football) field studies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34, 366-375] would lead spectators to almost take ownership of victories and share its benefits, thereby impacting their sense of national belonging in a positive manner. To this end, participants (N = 73) were asked to watch an edited video clip showing a victory of the French national rugby team playing against South Africa. As expected, results revealed that BIRGing mediated the relationship between team identification and one's sense of national belonging. In closing, a number of implications are discussed along with future research avenues pertaining to the sport spectatorship literature.

Speech Auditory Brainstem Response through hearing aid stimulation.

Millions of people across the world are hearing impaired, and rely on hearing aids to improve their everyday life. Objective audiometry could optimize hearing aid fitting, and is of particular interest for non-communicative patients. Speech Auditory Brainstem Response (speech ABR), a fine electrophysiological marker of speech encoding, is presently seen as a promising candidate for implementing objective audiometry; yet, unlike lower-frequency auditory-evoked potentials (AEPs) such as cortical AEPs or auditory steady-state responses (ASSRs), aided-speech ABRs (i.e., speech ABRs through hearing aid stimulation) have almost never been recorded. This may be due to their high-frequency components requesting a high temporal precision of the stimulation. We assess here a new approach to record high-quality and artifact-free speech ABR while stimulating directly through hearing aids. In 4 normal-hearing adults, we recorded speech ABR evoked by a /ba/ syllable binaurally delivered through insert earphones for quality control or through hearing aids. To assess the presence of a potential stimulus artifact, recordings were also done in mute conditions with the exact same potential sources of stimulus artifacts as in the main runs. Hearing aid stimulation led to artifact-free speech ABR in each participant, with the same quality as when using insert earphones, as shown with signal-to-noise (SNR) measurements. Our new approach consisting in directly transmitting speech stimuli through hearing aids allowed for a perfect temporal precision mandatory in speech ABR recordings, and could thus constitute a decisive step in hearing impairment investigation and in hearing aid fitting improvement.

Boosting pitch encoding with audiovisual interactions in congenital amusia.

The combination of information across senses can enhance perception, as revealed for example by decreased reaction times or improved stimulus detection. Interestingly, these facilitatory effects have been shown to be maximal when responses to unisensory modalities are weak. The present study investigated whether audiovisual facilitation can be observed in congenital amusia, a music-specific disorder primarily ascribed to impairments of pitch processing. Amusic individuals and their matched controls performed two tasks. In Task 1, they were required to detect auditory, visual, or audiovisual stimuli as rapidly as possible. In Task 2, they were required to detect as accurately and as rapidly as possible a pitch change within an otherwise monotonic 5-tone sequence that was presented either only auditorily (A condition), or simultaneously with a temporally congruent, but otherwise uninformative visual stimulus (AV condition). Results of Task 1 showed that amusics exhibit typical auditory and visual detection, and typical audiovisual integration capacities: both amusics and controls exhibited shorter response times for audiovisual stimuli than for either auditory stimuli or visual stimuli. Results of Task 2 revealed that both groups benefited from simultaneous uninformative visual stimuli to detect pitch changes: accuracy was higher and response times shorter in the AV condition than in the A condition. The audiovisual improvements of response times were observed for different pitch interval sizes depending on the group. These results suggest that both typical listeners and amusic individuals can benefit from multisensory integration to improve their pitch processing abilities and that this benefit varies as a function of task difficulty. These findings constitute the first step towards the perspective to exploit multisensory paradigms to reduce pitch-related deficits in congenital amusia, notably by suggesting that audiovisual paradigms are effective in an appropriate range of unimodal performance.

Topographic recordings of auditory evoked potentials to speech: subcortical and cortical responses.

Topographies of speech auditory brainstem response (speech ABR), a fine electrophysiological marker of speech encoding, have never been described. Yet, they could provide useful information to assess speech ABR generators and better characterize populations of interest (e.g., musicians, dyslexics). We present here a novel methodology of topographic speech ABR recording, using a 32-channel low sampling rate (5 kHz) EEG system. Quality of speech ABRs obtained with this conventional multichannel EEG system were compared to that of signals simultaneously recorded with a high sampling rate (13.3 kHz) EEG system. Correlations between speech ABRs recorded with the two systems revealed highly similar signals, without any significant difference between their signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Moreover, an advanced denoising method for multichannel data (denoising source separation) significantly improved SNR and allowed topography of speech ABR to be recovered.

Auditory enhancement of visual perception at threshold depends on visual abilities.

Whether or not multisensory interactions can improve detection thresholds, and thus widen the range of perceptible events is a long-standing debate. Here we revisit this question, by testing the influence of auditory stimuli on visual detection threshold, in subjects exhibiting a wide range of visual-only performance. Above the perceptual threshold, crossmodal interactions have indeed been reported to depend on the subject's performance when the modalities are presented in isolation. We thus tested normal-seeing subjects and short-sighted subjects wearing their usual glasses. We used a paradigm limiting potential shortcomings of previous studies: we chose a criterion-free threshold measurement procedure and precluded exogenous cueing effects by systematically presenting a visual cue whenever a visual target (a faint Gabor patch) might occur. Using this carefully controlled procedure, we found that concurrent sounds only improved visual detection thresholds in the sub-group of subjects exhibiting the poorest performance in the visual-only conditions. In these subjects, for oblique orientations of the visual stimuli (but not for vertical or horizontal targets), the auditory improvement was still present when visual detection was already helped with flanking visual stimuli generating a collinear facilitation effect. These findings highlight that crossmodal interactions are most efficient to improve perceptual performance when an isolated modality is deficient.

Non-verbal auditory cognition in patients with temporal epilepsy before and after anterior temporal lobectomy.

For patients with pharmaco-resistant temporal epilepsy, unilateral anterior temporal lobectomy (ATL) - i.e. the surgical resection of the hippocampus, the amygdala, the temporal pole and the most anterior part of the temporal gyri - is an efficient treatment. There is growing evidence that anterior regions of the temporal lobe are involved in the integration and short-term memorization of object-related sound properties. However, non-verbal auditory processing in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) has raised little attention. To assess non-verbal auditory cognition in patients with temporal epilepsy both before and after unilateral ATL, we developed a set of non-verbal auditory tests, including environmental sounds. We could evaluate auditory semantic identification, acoustic and object-related short-term memory, and sound extraction from a sound mixture. The performances of 26 TLE patients before and/or after ATL were compared to those of 18 healthy subjects. Patients before and after ATL were found to present with similar deficits in pitch retention, and in identification and short-term memorisation of environmental sounds, whereas not being impaired in basic acoustic processing compared to healthy subjects. It is most likely that the deficits observed before and after ATL are related to epileptic neuropathological processes. Therefore, in patients with drug-resistant TLE, ATL seems to significantly improve seizure control without producing additional auditory deficits.

Effect of acetazolamide on ventilatory response in subjects with chronic mountain sickness.

Although the effects of acetazolamide (ACZ) on ventilation during acute mountain sickness are well known, there are no studies assessing its effect on ventilatory response in chronic hypoxia. We studied this effect in patients with chronic mountain sickness (CMS). Subjects with CMS, living permanently at 4300 m, were assigned in a randomized, double-blind study to 250 mg/day (n=9) or to 500 mg/day (n=9) of ACZ. Resting end-tidal PET(O2) and end-tidal PET(CO2) were measured before and after 3 weeks of acetazolamide. Ventilatory responses were evaluated by the determination of sensitivity to hypoxia and to CO2. After treatment ventilatory response to hypoxia increased, resting PET(CO2) decreased, and ACZ caused a leftward shift in the position, but not a change in the slope of the ventilation (VE) versus PET(CO2) relationship. There were no differences between the two doses used. ACZ administration provides a beneficial effect on respiratory function of high altitude natives with CMS and thus it can be an effective therapy for the disease.

Spectators' identification with French sports teams: a French adaptation of the sport spectator identification scale.

Due to the works of Wann and colleagues, spectators' identification with teams has taken on a central role in the study of sports spectators' thought and behavior. However, no research in this area has measured identification with sports teams in the French context. Two studies attempted to develop a valid and reliable French version of the Sport Spectator Identification Scale (SSIS) developed by Wann and Branscombe in 1993 to measure team identification. In Study 1, 200 physical education students completed a French translation of the SSIS and several questions concerning their involvement, investment, and evaluation of the team's future performance. Results showed that the French translation of the SSIS is a reliable and one-dimensional instrument: strong relationships were found between identification with professional French teams and these variables. In Study 2, 143 physical education students completed the SSIS with a National sport team as the target team. Results confirmed the psychometric properties of the scale and indicated that persons who strongly identify with the National soccer team reported more involvement with the team and were more optimistic about future performances than persons low in identification.

Acetazolamide: a treatment for chronic mountain sickness.

RATIONALE: Chronic mountain sickness or Monge's disease is characterized by an excessive polycythemia in high-altitude dwellers, with a prevalence of 5 to 18% above 3,200 m. To date, no pharmacologic treatment is available. OBJECTIVES: We evaluated the efficacy of acetazolamide in the treatment of chronic mountain sickness and the importance of nocturnal hypoxemia in its pathophysiology. METHODS: A double-blind placebo-controlled study was performed in three groups of patients from Cerro de Pasco, Peru (4,300 m), treated orally for 3 weeks with placebo (n = 10), 250 mg of acetazolamide (n = 10), or 500 mg of acetazolamide (n = 10), daily. RESULTS: Acetazolamide decreased hematocrit by 7.1% (p < 0.001) and 6.7% (p < 0.001), serum erythropoietin by 67% (p < 0.01) and 50% (p < 0.001), and serum soluble transferrin receptors by 11.1% (p < 0.05) and 3.4% (p < 0.001), and increased serum ferritin by 540% (p < 0.001) and 134% (p < 0.001), for groups treated with 250 and 500 mg of acetazolamide, respectively. Acetazolamide (250 mg) increased nocturnal arterial O(2) saturation by 5% (p < 0.01) and decreased mean nocturnal heart rate by 11% (p < 0.05) and the number of apnea-hypopnea episodes during sleep by 74% (p < 0.05). The decrease in erythropoietin was attributed mainly to the acetazolamide-induced increase in ventilation and arterial O(2) saturation. CONCLUSIONS: Acetazolamide, the first efficient pharmacologic treatment of chronic mountain sickness without adverse effects, reduces hypoventilation, which may be accentuated during sleep, and blunts erythropoiesis. Its low cost may allow wide development with a considerable positive impact on public health in high-altitude regions.