Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (May 2014)

Less effort, better results: how does music act on prefrontal cortex in older adults during verbal encoding? An fNIRS study.

  • Laura eFerreri,
  • Emmanuel eBigand,
  • Stephane ePerrey,
  • Makii eMuthalib,
  • Patrick eBard,
  • Aurélia eBugaiska

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00301
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 8

Abstract

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Several neuroimaging studies of cognitive ageing revealed deficits in episodic memory abilities as a result of prefrontal cortex (PFC) limitations. Improving episodic memory performance despite PFC deficits is thus a critical issue in ageing research. Listening to music stimulates cognitive performance in several non-purely musical activities (e.g. language and memory). Thus, music could represent a rich and helpful source during verbal encoding and therefore help subsequent retrieval. Furthermore, such benefit could be reflected in less demand of PFC, which is known to be crucial for encoding processes. This study aimed to investigate whether music may improve episodic memory in older adults while decreasing the PFC activity.Sixteen healthy older adults (µ=64.5y) encoded lists of words presented with or without a musical background while their dorsolateral PFC (DLPFC) activity was monitored using a 8-channel continuous-wave near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) system (Oxymon Mk III, Artinis, The Netherlands). Behavioral results indicated a better source memory performance for words encoded with music compared to words encoded with silence (p

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