In healthy adults, autobiographical memories (AMs) evoked by music appear to have unique cognitive characteristics that set them apart from AMs evoked by other cues. If this is the case, we might expect music cues to alleviate AM deficits in clinical disorders. This systematic review examines music-evoked autobiographical memories (MEAMs) in clinical populations, focusing on cognitive characteristics, and whether MEAMs differ from AMs evoked by other stimuli.We identified 15 studies featuring participants with Alzheimer's disease (AD), behavioral variant -Frontotemporal dementia (bv-FTD), acquired brain damage, and depression. We found that music evokes AMs in these disorders, and that familiar music was more likely to evoke AMs. Compared with healthy controls, AD participants had a relative advantage for MEAMs over picture-evoked AMs. People with damage to the medial prefrontal cortex showed preserved access to MEAMs in terms of frequency, but a relative disadvantage regarding the episodic richness for MEAMs, but not for memories cued by pictures, compared to controls. Participants with bv-FTD had fewer AMs evoked after both music and pictures than healthy controls. Across conditions, MEAMs were generally specific and retrieved fast, suggesting little retrieval effort. MEAMs were also positive, except in depression, where as many negative as positive AMs were produced. These findings suggest several underlying cognitive and affective mechanisms of MEAMs, including anxiety reduction, increased fluency, musicevoked emotions, reminiscence, and involuntary retrieval, and that these might be moderated by musical abilities and memory for music. In conclusion, MEAMs appear to be relatively well preserved, especially in AD.
Unilateral spatial neglect (USN) is a disorder characterized by the failure to report, respond to, or orient toward the contralateral side of space to a brain lesion. Current assessment methods often fail to discover milder forms, cannot differentiate between unilateral spatial neglect subtypes and lack ecological validity. There is also a need for treatment methods that target subtypes. Immersive virtual reality (VR) systems in combination with eye-tracking (ET) have the potential to overcome these shortcomings, by providing more naturalistic environments and tasks, with sensitive and detailed measures. This systematic review examines the state of the art of research on these technologies as applied in the assessment and treatment of USN. As we found no studies that combined immersive VR and ET, we reviewed these approaches individually. The review of VR included seven articles, the ET review twelve. The reviews revealed promising results. (1) All included studies found significant group-level differences for several USN measures. In addition, several studies found asymmetric behavior in VR and ET tasks for patients who did not show signs of USN in conventional tests. Particularly promising features were multitasking in complex VR environments and detailed eye-movement analysis. (2) No VR and only a few ET studies attempted to differentiate USN subtypes, although the technologies appeared appropriate. One ET study grouped USN participants using individual heatmaps, and another differentiated between subtypes on drawing tasks. Regarding (3) ecological validity, although no studies tested the prognostic validity of their assessment methods, VR and ET studies utilized naturalistic tasks and stimuli reflecting everyday situations. Technological characteristics, such as the field of view and refresh rate of the head-mounted displays, could be improved, though, to improve ecological validity. We found (4) no studies that utilized VR or ET technologies for USN treatment up until the search date of the 26th of February 2020. In conclusion, VR-ET-based systems show great potential for USN assessment. VR-ET holds great promise for treatment, for example, by monitoring behavior and adapting and tailoring to the individual person’s needs and abilities. Future research should consider developing methods for individual subtypes and differential diagnostics to inform individual treatment programs.
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