This experiment was conducted to investigate cross-modal interactions in the emotional experience of music listeners. Previous research showed that visual information present in a musical performance is rich in expressive content, and moderates the subjective emotional experience of a participant listening and/or observing musical stimuli [Vines, B. W., Krumhansl, C. L., Wanderley, M. M., & Levitin, D. J. (2006). Cross-modal interactions in the perception of musical performance. Cognition, 101, 80–113.]. The goal of this follow-up experiment was to replicate this cross-modal interaction by investigating the objective, physiological aspect of emotional response to music measuring electrodermal activity [...

The Frontal Assessment Battery is a set of six subtests that is used widely to assess frontal cortical executive dysfunction. Performance on the Frontal Assessment Battery has been shown to be sensitive to various neurodegenerative diseases, but it has never been shown to be sensitive to damage restricted to the frontal cortex. Thus, despite its wide use, it has never been validated on an appropriate population of patients with frontal lesions. The present study shows that, of the six subtests that comprise the Frontal Assessment Battery, only performance on the verbal fluency subtest (mental flexibility) was specifically sensitive to injury restricted to the frontal cortex. Performance of patients with damage to the dorsal part of the medial frontal region in the language-dominant left hemisphere was impaired. None of these patients was aphasic at the time of testing. The critical region in the dorsomedial frontal cortex includes the supplementary speech zone but is not restricted to it: it extends into the cingulate motor region and the paracingulate cortex as well as the medial prefrontal areas 8 and 9. The results indicate that the Frontal Assessment Battery is not a sensitive measure of prefrontal cortical dysfunction, except for the verbal fluency subtest.

The prefrontal cortex appears to contribute to the mnemonic retrieval of the context within which stimuli are experienced, but only under certain conditions that remain to be clarified. Patients with lesions to the frontal cortex, the temporal lobe and neurologically intact individuals were tested for context memory retrieval when verbal stimuli (words) had been experienced across multiple (unstable context condition) or unique (stable context condition) contexts; basic recognition memory of these words-in-contexts was also tested. Patients with lesions to the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) were impaired on context retrieval only when the words had been seen in multiple contexts, demonstrating that this prefrontal region is critical for active retrieval processing necessary to disambiguate memory items embedded across multiple contexts. Patients with lesions to the left dorsomedial prefrontal region were impaired on both context retrieval conditions, regardless of the stability of the stimulus-to-context associations. Conversely, prefrontal lesions sparing the ventrolateral and dorsomedial regions did not impair context retrieval. Only patients with temporal lobe excisions were impaired on basic recognition memory. The results demonstrate a basic contribution of the left dorsomedial frontal region to mnemonic context retrieval, with the VLPFC engaged, selectively, when contextual relations are unstable and require disambiguation.