Omar, R.;
Hailstone, J. C.;
Warren, J. E.;
Crutch, S. J.;
Warren, J. D.;
(2010)
The cognitive organization of music knowledge: a clinical analysis.
Brain
, 133
(4)
pp. 1200-1213.
10.1093/brain/awp345.
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Abstract
Despite much recent interest in the clinical neuroscience of music processing, the cognitive organization of music as a domain of non-verbal knowledge has been little studied. Here we addressed this issue systematically in two expert musicians with clinical diagnoses of semantic dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, in comparison with a control group of healthy expert musicians. In a series of neuropsychological experiments, we investigated associative knowledge of musical compositions (musical objects), musical emotions, musical instruments (musical sources) and music notation (musical symbols). These aspects of music knowledge were assessed in relation to musical perceptual abilities and extra-musical neuropsychological functions. The patient with semantic dementia showed relatively preserved recognition of musical compositions and musical symbols despite severely impaired recognition of musical emotions and musical instruments from sound. In contrast, the patient with Alzheimer’s disease showed impaired recognition of compositions, with somewhat better recognition of composer and musical era, and impaired comprehension of musical symbols, but normal recognition of musical emotions and musical instruments from sound. The findings suggest that music knowledge is fractionated, and superordinate musical knowledge is relatively more robust than knowledge of particular music. We propose that music constitutes a distinct domain of non-verbal knowledge but shares certain cognitive organizational features with other brain knowledge systems. Within the domain of music knowledge, dissociable cognitive mechanisms process knowledge derived from physical sources and the knowledge of abstract musical entities.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The cognitive organization of music knowledge: a clinical analysis |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1093/brain/awp345 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/brain/awp345 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Authors 2010. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Brain. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | Music, semantic memory, dementia, semantic dementia, Alzheimer’s disease |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology > Neurodegenerative Diseases |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/20066 |
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