Bénédicte Poulin-Charronnat

• University of Burgundy

Expertise is associated with a knowledge-driven information processing approach. Experts benefit from long-term knowledge structures—chunks and retrieval structures/templates—leading them to formulate expectations about local stimulus characteristics and to extract information projected onto distant areas from the fixation location. In an attempt t...

Although both motor imagery (MI) and low-frequency sound listening have independently been shown to modulate brain activity, the potential synergistic effects that may arise from their combined application remains unexplored. Any further modulation derived from this combination may be relevant for motor learning and rehabilitation. We probed neurop...

Music reading is the key to literacy for musicians in the Western music tradition. This high-level activity requires an efficient extraction of the visual information from the score to the current needs of the execution. Differences in eye movements between expert and non-expert musicians during music reading have been shown. The present study goes...

Classical music pianists of five different conservatory levels, from undergraduate to professional, were tested on a sight-reading task with eye-movement recording. They had to sight read both tonal classical scores that followed the rules specific to Western tonal music, and atonal contemporary scores, which do not follow these rules. This study a...

Mental fatigue is common in society, but its effects on force production capacities remain unclear. This study aimed to investigate the impact of mental fatigue on maximal force production, rate of force development-scaling factor (RFD-SF), and force steadiness during handgrip contractions. Fourteen participants performed two randomized sessions, d...

While both motor imagery (MI) and low-frequency sound listening have independently demonstrated the ability to modulate brain activity, there remains an unexplored frontier regarding the potential synergistic effects that may arise from their combined application. Any further modulation derived from this combination may be relevant for motor learni...

Smartphones are now in very widespread use, and concerns have arisen about potential detrimental effects, even with acute use. These adverse consequences are often linked to the emergence of mental fatigue. While the cognitive implications of fatigue are well-documented, knowledge about the specific influence of acute smartphone use on cognitive pe...

Learning to read and play music written in standard notation, termed sight reading, is an important yet difficult aspect of early music education. However, the music contingency learning procedure produces rapid and robust early learning of the motor execution associated with note positions. In this task, nonmusicians identify a note name (e.g., "d...

The current study examined, for the first time in a developmental perspective, the effect of response-to-stimulus interval (RSI) in incidental sequence learning (SL). Children aged 4, 7, and 10 years performed a serial reaction time (SRT) task in which the RSI was systematically manipulated (0, 250, 500, or 750 ms). SL (difference in reaction times...

La fatigue mentale est un phénomène physiologique qui induit une altération des performances cognitives et physiques. De nombreuses études ont été conduites ces dernières années afin de savoir comment prévenir ou limiter et/ou compenser les effets délétères liés à la fatigue mentale. L’objectif de cette revue narrative de la littérature est de prop...

Tinnitus is described as an uncomfortable sound or noise heard by an individual in the absence of an external sound source. Treating this phantom perception remains difficult even if drug and nondrug therapies are used to alleviate symptoms. The present case study aimed to investigate whether prism adaptation could induce beneficial aftereffects in...

In order to design age-appropriate digital games, it is necessary to make better use of our existing knowledge about learning processes and adopt a true developmental perspective, as the impact of digital games can vary depending on the evolution of the child’s cognitive resources with age. The present study compared the impact of digital games tha...

Expert memory theories assume that over the course of practicing a discipline, knowledge structures are built up in long-term memory (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995) allowing experts to process domain-specific information in a rapid and structural way (i.e., chunks, templates; Chase & Simon, 1973; Gobet & Simon, 1996). In this study, pianists from five c...

ntroduction En France, plus de 84% de la population en possède un smartphone. Cependant, son utilisation excessive peut entraîner des problèmes psychologiques et physiques (e.g., dépendance, vision floue et douleurs). Certaines études récentes indiquent que l'utilisation du smartphone peut également induire une dégradation des performances sportive...

The current meta-analysis was conducted on 12 studies comparing the eye movements of expert versus non-expert musicians and attempted to determine which eye movement measures are expertise dependent during music reading. The total dataset of 61 comparisons was divided into four subsets, each concerning one eye-movement variable (i.e., fixation dura...

Sensorimotor aftereffects have been widely studied after lateral prism adaptation but not after vertical prism adaptation. It is thus well-known that lateral prism adaptation produces aftereffects on visuospatial representation and, recently, on auditory perception. This study aimed to explore the sensorimotor after-effects of vertical prism adapta...

The present report investigated whether nonmusicians can incidentally learn musical skills needed for sight-reading. On each trial, participants identified a note name written inside of a note on the musical staff. In Experiment 1, each note was presented frequently with the congruent note name (e.g., "do" with the note for "do") and rarely with th...

In a sight-reading task, the position of the eyes on the score is generally further ahead than the note being produced by the instrument. This anticipation allows musicians to identify the upcoming notes and possible difficulties and to plan their gestures accordingly. The eye-hand span (EHS) corresponds to this offset between the eye and the hand...

Objective: Prism adaptation was shown to modify auditory perception. Using a dichotic listening task, which assesses auditory divided attention, benefits of a rightward prism adaptation were demonstrated in neglect patients (i.e., a syndrome following right hemisphere brain damage) by reducing their left auditory extinction. It is currently unknow...

Mental fatigue impairs both cognitive and physical performance. Bioactive substances (e.g., caffeine) have been used to counteract mental fatigue but could have side effects. The present study aimed to test two non-bioactive strategies to counteract mental fatigue: physical activity and listening to music. The participants first performed an arm-po...

Prism adaptation consists of pointing to visual targets while wearing prisms that shift the visual field laterally. The aftereffects are not restricted to sensorimotor level but extend to spatial cognition. There is a link between spatial representation and auditory frequency, with an association of low frequencies on the left side and high frequen...

Recent literature suggests that when prolonged, motor imagery (MI) induces mental fatigue and negatively impacts subsequent physical exercise. The aim of this study was to confirm this possibility with neurophysiological and self-reported measures. Thirteen participants performed 200 imagined isometric knee extension contractions (Prolonged MI cond...

The effects of mental fatigue on both cognitive and physical performance are well described in the literature, but the recovery aspects of mental fatigue have been less investigated. The present study aimed to fill this gap by examining the persistence of mental fatigue on behavior and electrophysiological mechanisms. Fifteen participants performed...

INTRODUCTION: Mental fatigue (MF) is defined as a psychobiological state caused by prolonged periods of demanding cognitive activity and characterized by subjective feelings of “tiredness” and “lack of energy (Boksem and Tops, 2008). MF can have many effects on physical performances (for a review see Pageaux and Lepers, 2018). Among the negative ef...

Introduction La fatigue mentale est état psychobiologique causé par la réalisation d’une tâche cognitive prolongée et/ou intense, caractérisée par une sensation subjective de fatigue et de manque d’énergie (Boksem & Tops, 2008). Elle impacte les performances cognitives (e.g., baisse de l’attention) mais également physiques (e.g., Pageaux & Lepers,...

The present study aimed to ascertain whether the automaticity of a learned-cognitive process persisted after lengthy and complete cessation of practice. The musical Stroop paradigm offers the opportunity to test this specific question by evaluating the automaticity of note naming, the flexibility in manipulating practice of which is much greater th...

The present study aimed to ascertain whether the automaticity of a learned-cognitive process persisted after lengthy and complete cessation of practice. The musical Stroop paradigm offers the opportunity to test this specific question by evaluating the automaticity of note naming, the flexibility in manipulating practice of which is much greater th...

Cochlear implant (CI) users can only access limited pitch information through their device, which hinders music appreciation. Poor music perception may not only be due to CI technical limitations; lack of training or negative attitudes toward the electric sound might also contribute to it. Our study investigated with an implicit (indirect) investig...

The size of the Stroop effect is usually taken as dependent on the level of practice of the more automatized of two competing processes (e.g., reading in the standard Stroop task), possibly modulated in children by the age-dependent ability to inhibit nonrelevant information. However, this conclusion stems from experimental settings where the autom...

INTRODUCTION: Motor Imagery (MI) is the mental simulation of action without concomitant movements. Recently, it has been shown that prolonged MI increases feeling of fatigue and impairs motor control, suggesting that MI may induce mental fatigue. The present study, which used electroencephalography (EEG), aims first at analyzing the changes in EEG-...

Slow-growing, infiltrative brain tumours may modify the electrophysiological balance between the two hemispheres. To determine whether and how asymmetry of EEG rhythms during motor preparation might occur following "awake brain surgery" for this type of tumour, we recorded electroencephalograms during a simple visuo-manual reaction time paradigm pe...

In language acquisition research, the prevailing position is that listeners exploit statistical cues, in particular transitional probabilities between syllables, to discover words of a language. However, other cues are also involved in word discovery. Assessing the weight learners give to these different cues leads to a better understanding of the...

The key point of a paradigm initially proposed by Perruchet (Pavlov J Biol Sci 20:163-170, 1985) to dissociate conscious expectancies from automatic-link formation in classical conditioning settings is the use of a partial reinforcement schedule, in which the unconditioned stimulus (US) follows the conditioned stimulus (CS) only half of the time on...

On the basis of the ‘zygonic’ theory (Ockelford, 2006), Grundy and Ockelford (2014) investigate musical expectations evoked during the course of hearing a piece for the first time in a prodigious musical savant (Derek Paravicini). Overall, the results provided by Derek support the principles of the zygonic theory, especially that the higher the imp...

Slow-growing, infiltrative brain tumours may modify the electrophysiological balance between the two hemispheres. To determine whether and how asymmetry in interhemispheric excitability might occur following "wide-awake surgery" for this type of tumour, we recorded electroencephalograms during a simple visuo-manual reaction time paradigm performed...

Most earlier studies investigating the evolution of the Stroop effect with the amount of reading practice have reported data consistent with an inverted U-shaped curve, whereby the Stroop effect appears early during reading acquisition, reaches a peak after 2 or 3 years of practice, and then continuously decreases until adulthood. The downward comp...

During the last decade, it has been argued that (1) music processing involves syntactic representations similar to those observed in language, and (2) that music and language share similar syntactic-like processes and neural resources. This claim is important for understanding the origin of music and language abilities and, furthermore, it has clin...

There is large evidence that infants are able to exploit statistical cues to discover the words of their language. However, how they proceed to do so is the object of enduring debates. The prevalent position is that words are extracted from the prior computation of statistics, in particular the transitional probabilities between syllables. As an al...

The asymmetry of interference in a Stroop task usually refers to the well-documented result that incongruent colour words slow colour naming (Stroop effect) but incongruent colours do not slow colour word reading (no reverse Stroop effect). A few other studies have suggested that, more generally, a reverse Stroop effect can be occasionally observed...

Grégoire, Perruchet, and Poulin-Charronnat (2013) claimed that the Musical Stroop task, which reveals the automaticity of note naming in musician experts, provides a new tool for studying the development of automatisms through extensive training in natural settings. Many of the criticisms presented in the four commentaries published in this issue a...

Like discourse, music is a dynamic process that occurs over time. Listeners usually expect some events or structures of events to occur in the prolongation of a given context. Part of the musical emotional experience would depend upon how composers (improvisers) fulfill these expectancies. Musical expectations are a core phenomenon of music cogniti...

The usual color-word Stroop task, as well as most other Stroop-like paradigms, has provided invaluable information on the automaticity of word reading. However, investigating automaticity through reading alone has inherent limitations. This study explored whether a Stroop-like effect could be obtained by replacing word reading with note naming in m...

Recognition memory for details of musical phrases (discrimination between targets and similar lures) improves for up to 15 s following the presentation of a target, during continuous listening to the ongoing piece. This is attributable to binding of stimulus features during that time interval. The ongoing-listening paradigm is an ecologically valid...

To investigate interhemispheric imbalance following “awake surgeries” of slow-growing tumors we recorded EEG in a visuo-manual RT paradigm. Increase of cortical excitability within the ipsilesional hemisphere was signed by increased ERPs amplitude for two patients. The cortical excitability in the lesioned hemisphere may be increased to maintain pe...

A theoretical landmark in the growing literature comparing language and music is the shared syntactic integration resource hypothesis (SSIRH; e.g., Patel, 2008), which posits that the successful processing of linguistic and musical materials relies, at least partially, on the mastery of a common syntactic processor. Supporting the SSIRH, Slevc, Ros...

Recent research has suggested that music and language processing share neural resources, leading to new hypotheses about interference in the simultaneous processing of these two structures. The present study investigated the effect of a musical chord's tonal function on syntactic processing (Experiment 1) and semantic processing (Experiment 2) usin...

Our study investigated whether newly acquired auditory structure knowledge allows listeners to develop perceptual expectations for future events. For that aim, we introduced a new experimental approach that combines implicit learning and priming paradigms. Participants were first exposed to structured tone sequences without being told about the und...

In a recent study, G. Kuhn and Z. Dienes (2005) reported that participants previously exposed to a set of musical tunes generated by a biconditional grammar subsequently preferred new tunes that respected the grammar over new ungrammatical tunes. Because the study and test tunes did not share any chunks of adjacent intervals, this result may be con...

This article focuses on the combinatory nature of Western music. What type of organization in the tonal pitch structure allows the production of so many different styles, and so many different pieces inside each style? In order to address this issue, the article starts start by considering the theoretical distinction between 'tonal' and 'event hier...

L’auditeur occidental devient sensible aux régularités du système musical tonal par simple exposition aux pièces musicales. Les connaissances implicites ainsi acquises permettent à l’auditeur de développer des attentes musicales sur les événements à venir. Ces attentes jouent un rôle dans l’expressivité musicale, mais elles influencent également le...

The present study investigates the effect of a change in syntactic-like musical function on event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Eight-chord piano sequences were presented to musically expert and novice listeners. Instructed to watch a movie and to ignore the musical sequences, the participants had to react when a chord was played with a differen...

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The present paper reviews a set of studies designed to investigate different aspects of the capacity for processing Western music. This includes perceiving the relationships between a theme and its variations, perceiving musical tensions and relaxations, generating musical expectancies, integrating local structures in large-scale structures, learni...

Using short and long contexts, the present study investigated musical priming effects that are based on chord repetition and harmonic relatedness. A musical target (a chord) was preceded by either an identical prime or a different but harmonically related prime. In contrast to words, pictures, and environmental sounds, chord processing was not faci...

Three experiments examined children's knowledge of harmony in Western music. The children heard a series of chords followed by a final, target chord. In Experiment 1, French 6- and 11-year-olds judged whether the target was sung with the vowel /i/ or /u/. In Experiment 2, Australian 8- and 11-year-olds judged whether the target was played on a pian...

The present study investigates the potential influence of voice leading on harmonic priming effects. Eight-chord sequences were presented to the participants, who had to perform a fast reaction task on a target chord ending the sequences. The target chord acted either as a tonic chord or as a subdominant chord. On the basis of previous findings, we...

It has been shown that harmonic structure may influence the processing of phonemes whatever the extent of participants' musical expertise [Bigand, E., Tillmann, B., Poulin, B., D'Adamo, D. A., & Madurell, F. (2001). The effect of harmonic context on phoneme monitoring in vocal music. Cognition, 81, B11-B20]. The present study goes a step further by...

The perceptual structure of the five themes of Roger Reynolds's The Angel of Death was investigated. We studied how listeners follow the musical progression of each theme and whether or not they perceive the temporal implications. In the first phase, participants performed three tasks on the full themes, one of which consisted of segmenting the mus...

The present study investigates the effect of a change in instrumentation on the recognition of musical excerpts in Western contemporary and tonal music. The critical finding was a strong effect of timbre on the recognition of musical material that is modulated by both the extent of musical expertise and the musical style. Changing the instrumentati...

This study investigated the strength of sensory and cognitive components involved in musical priming. In Experiment 1, the harmonic function of the target chord and the number of pitch classes shared by the prime sequence and the target chord were manipulated. In Experiment 2, the temporal course of sensory and cognitive priming was investigated. F...

This study investigated the strength of sensory and cognitive components involved in musical priming. In Experiment 1, the harmonic function of the target chord and the number of pitch classes shared by the prime sequence and the target chord were manipulated. In Experiment 2, the temporal course of sensory and cognitive priming was investigated. F...

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The processing of a target chord depends on the previous musical context in which it has appeared. This harmonic priming effect occurs for fine syntactic-like changes in context and is observed irrespective of the extent of participants' musical expertise (Bigand & Pineau, Perception and Psychophysics, 59 (1997) 1098). The present study investigate...