Catherine Liégeois-Chauvel

University of Pittsburgh | Pitt

The current standard model of language production involves a sensorimotor dorsal stream connecting areas in the temporo‐parietal junction with those in the inferior frontal gyrus and lateral premotor cortex. These regions have been linked to various aspects of word production such as phonological processing or articulatory programming, primarily th...

Intracranial EEG (iEEG) performed during the pre-surgical evaluation of refractory epilepsy provides a great opportunity to investigate the neurophysiology of human cognitive functions with exceptional spatial and temporal precisions. A difficulty of the iEEG approach for cognitive neuroscience, however, is the potential variability across patients...

The current standard model of language production involves a sensorimotor dorsal stream connecting areas in the temporo-parietal junction with those in the inferior frontal gyrus and lateral premotor cortex. These regions have been linked to various aspects of word production such as phonological processing or articulatory programming, primarily th...

Illusions of inappropriate familiarity with the current experience or hallucinatory recall of memories are reported in temporal lobe seizures. Pathophysiological hypotheses have been proposed, involving temporal limbic regions (Hughlings-Jackson), temporal neocortex (“interpretive cortex”, Penfield), or both (Bancaud). Recent data acquired from pre...

The posterior part of the superior temporal gyrus (STG) has long been known to be a crucial hub for auditory and language processing, at the crossroad of the functionally defined ventral and dorsal pathways. Anatomical studies have shown that this “auditory cortex” is composed of several cytoarchitectonic areas whose limits do not consistently matc...

Intracerebral stereotaxic electroencephalography (SEEG) performed during the pre-surgical evaluation of refractory epilepsy provides a formidable opportunity to investigate the neurophysiology of human cognitive functions with unrivaled spatial and temporal precision. A difficulty of the SEEG approach for cognitive neuroscience, however, is the pot...

The posterior part of the superior temporal gyrus (STG) has long been known to be a crucial hub for auditory and language processing, at the crossroad of the functionally defined ventral and dorsal pathways. Anatomical studies have shown that this “auditory cortex” is composed of several cytoarchitectonic areas whose limits do not consistently matc...

A crucial element of the surgical treatment of medically refractory epilepsy is to delineate cortical areas that must be spared in order to avoid clinically relevant neurological and neuropsychological deficits postoperatively. For each patient, this typically necessitates determining the language lateralization between hemispheres and language loc...

Neural oscillations in auditory cortex are argued to support parsing and representing speech constituents at their corresponding temporal scales. Yet, how incoming sensory information interacts with ongoing spontaneous brain activity, what features of the neuronal microcircuitry underlie spontaneous and stimulus-evoked spectral fingerprints, and wh...

Speech perception is mediated by both left and right auditory cortices but with differential sensitivity to specific acoustic information contained in the speech signal. A detailed description of this functional asymmetry is missing, and the underlying models are widely debated. We analyzed cortical responses from 96 epilepsy patients with electrod...

In the natural environment, attended sounds tend to be perceived much better than unattended sounds. However, the physiological mechanism of how our neural systems direct the state of perceptual attention to prepare for the detection of upcoming acoustic stimuli before auditory stream segregation remains elusive. In this study, based on the direct...

Neural oscillations in auditory cortex are argued to support parsing and representing speech constituents at their corresponding temporal scales. Yet, how incoming sensory information interacts with ongoing spontaneous brain activity, what features of the neuronal microcircuitry underlie spontaneous and stimulus-evoked spectral fingerprints, and wh...

Speech perception is mediated by both left and right auditory cortices, but with differential sensitivity to specific acoustic information contained in the speech signal. A detailed description of this functional asymmetry is missing, and the underlying models are widely debated. We analyzed cortical responses from 96 epilepsy patients with electro...

Language is mediated by pathways connecting distant brain regions that have diverse functional roles. For word production, the network includes a ventral pathway, connecting temporal and inferior frontal regions, and a dorsal pathway, connecting parietal and frontal regions. Despite the importance of word production for scientific and clinical purp...

Language production requires that semantic representations are mapped to lexical representations on the basis of the ongoing context to select the appropriate words. This mapping is thought to generate two opposing phenomena, "semantic priming," where multiple word candidates are activated, and "interference," where these word activities are differ...

Objectives Hemispheric dominance for language is one of the most important to predict both risks of language production and verbal memory impairment. Evoked activities recorded from depth electrodes in the auditory areas have been proved to be efficient to reveal dominant hemisphere [1]. Similar information can also be obtained for non-invasive rec...

Objectives: Ictal language disturbances may occur in dominant hemisphere temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), but little is known about the precise anatomoelectroclinical correlations. This study investigated the different facets of ictal aphasia in intracerebrally recorded TLE. Methods: Video-stereoelectroencephalography (SEEG) recordings of 37 seizures...

Objectives: Ictal language disturbances may occur in dominant hemisphere temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), but little is known about the precise anatomoelectroclinical correlations. This study investigated the different facets of ictal aphasia in intracerebrally recorded TLE. Methods: Video-stereoelectroencephalography (SEEG) recordings of 37 seizur...

Although motor control has been extensively studied, most research involving neural recordings has focused on primary motor cortex, pre-motor cortex, supplementary motor area, and cerebellum. These regions are involved during normal movements, however, associative cortices and hippocampus are also likely involved during perturbed movements as one m...

This cover image, by Emmanuel J. Barbeau et al., is based on the Research Article Hippocampus duality: Memory and novelty detection are subserved by distinct mechanisms, DOI: 10.1002/hipo.22699.

We provide a quantitative assessment of the parallel-processing hypothesis included in various language-processing models. First, we highlight the importance of reasoning about cognitive processing at the level of single trials rather than using averages. Then, we report the results of an experiment in which the hypothesis was tested at an unpreced...

The hippocampus plays a pivotal role both in novelty detection and in long-term memory. The physiological mechanisms underlying these behaviors have yet to be understood in humans. We recorded intracerebral evoked potentials within the hippocampus of epileptic patients (n=10) during both memory and novelty detection tasks (targets in oddball tasks)...

18th World Congress of Psychophysiology of the International Organization of Psychophysiology (IOP), Havana, CUBA, AUG 31-SEP 04, 2016

18th World Congress of Psychophysiology of the International Organization of Psychophysiology (IOP), Havana, CUBA, AUG 31-SEP 04, 2016

Picture naming is a standard task used to probe language processes in healthy and impaired speakers. It recruits a broad neural network of language related areas, among which the hippocampus is rarely included. However, the hippocampus could play a role during picture naming, subtending, for example, implicit learning of the links between pictured...

Music is a sound structure of remarkable acoustical and temporal complexity. Although it cannot denote specific meaning, it is one of the most potent and universal stimuli for inducing mood. How the auditory and limbic systems interact, and whether this interaction is lateralized when feeling emotions related to music, remains unclear. We studied t...

The fact that feed-forward and top-down propagation of sensory information use distinct frequency bands is an appealing assumption for which evidence remains scarce. Here we obtain human depth recordings from two auditory cortical regions in both hemispheres, while subjects listen to sentences, and show that information travels in each direction us...

The capacity to evaluate the outcomes of our actions is fundamental for adapting and optimizing behavior and depends on an action-monitoring system that assesses ongoing actions and detects errors. The neuronal network underlying this executive function, classically attributed to the rostral cingulate zone, is poorly characterized in humans, owing...

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is associated with visuospatial working memory deficits. Intolerance of uncertainty is thought to be a core component of OCD symptoms. Recent findings argue for a possible relationship between abilities in visuospatial memory and uncertainty. However, this relationship remains unclear in both OCD patients and hea...

Recent theory of physiology of language suggests a dual stream dorsal/ventral organization of speech perception. Using intra-cerebral Event-related potentials (ERPs) during pre-surgical assessment of twelve drug-resistant epileptic patients, we aimed to single out electrophysiological patterns during both lexical-semantic and phonological monitorin...

30th International Epilepsy Congress, Montreal, CANADA, JUN 23-27, 2013

This study investigates the spatiotemporal brain dynamics of emotional information processing during reading using a combination of surface and intracranial electroencephalography (EEG). Two different theoretical views were opposed. According to the standard psycholinguistic perspective, emotional responses to words are generated within the reading...

Low-gamma (25–45 Hz) and theta (4–8 Hz) oscillations are proposed to underpin the integration of phonemic and syllabic information, respectively. How these two scales of analysis split functions across hemispheres is unclear. We analyzed cortical responses from an epileptic patient with a rare bilateral electrode implantation (stereotactic EEG) in...

Repeated transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) of auditory cortex has been proposed to treat refractory chronic tinnitus, but the involved mechanisms of action remain largely unknown. The purpose of this pilot study was to evaluate the impact of rTMS on auditory cortex activity in a series of tinnitus patients, using for the first time both func...

Recent findings in the neurophysiology of language production have provided a detailed description of the brain network underlying this behavior, as well as some indications about the timing of operations. Despite their invaluable utility, these data generally suffer from limitations either in terms of temporal resolution, or in terms of spatial lo...

Human auditory cortex is, in the classical sense, composed of multiple fields distributed both on the exposed surface of the superior temporal gyrus (STG) and on the areas buried within the Sylvian fissure on the supratemporal plane (STP). In addition, cortex of the parietal and frontal lobes, while not generally considered part of the classical au...

Performance in recognition memory differs among patients with medial temporal lobe epilepsy (MTLE). We aimed to determine if distinct recognition performances (normal vs. impaired) could be related to distinct patterns of brain activation during encoding. Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activation profiles were obtained d...

Introduction La reconnaissance des visages est une habilité perceptuelle cruciale dans les interactions sociales permettant une reconnaissance rapide des visages quelque soit la condition de rencontre. Objectifs Le but de cette étude était de mettre en évidence les corrélations neuronales de la reconnaissance des visages en fonction des conditions...

There are two competing views on the mechanisms underlying the generation of visual evoked potentials/fields in EEG/MEG. The classical hypothesis assumes an additive wave on top of background noise. Another hypothesis states that the evoked activity can totally or partially arise from a phase resetting of the ongoing alpha rhythm. There is no conse...

In addition to the hippocampus, the entorhinal/perirhinal cortices are often involved in temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). It has been proposed that these anterior parahippocampal structures play a key role in recognition memory. We studied the voxel-based PET correlation between number of correctly recognized targets in a new recognition memory paradi...

Through study of clinical cases with brain lesions as well as neuroimaging studies of cognitive processing of words and pictures, it has been established that material-specific hemispheric specialization exists. It remains however unclear whether such specialization holds true for all processes involved in complex tasks, such as recognition memory....

Most of what we know about the human frontal eye field (FEF) is extrapolated from studies in animals. There is ample evidence that this region is crucial for eye movements. However, evidence is accumulating that this region also plays a role in sensory processing and that it belongs to a "fast brain" system. We set out to investigate these issues i...

Word finding difficulties are often reported by epileptic patients with seizures originating from the language dominant cerebral hemisphere, for example, in temporal lobe epilepsy. Evidence regarding the brain regions underlying this deficit comes from studies of peri-operative electro-cortical stimulation, as well as post-surgical performance. Thi...

Regions involved in language processing have been observed in the inferior part of the left temporal lobe. Although collectively labelled 'the Basal Temporal Language Area' (BTLA), these territories are functionally heterogeneous and are involved in language perception (i.e. reading or semantic task) or language production (speech arrest after stim...

The human auditory cortex codes speech temporally according to sequential acoustico-phonetic cues like the voice onset time (VOT). This coding is predominantly left-lateralized in normal readers. We examined VOT-processing asymmetries in adults with a history of developmental dyslexia (DD-history+). Auditory-evoked potentials (AEPs) to voiced (/ba/...

To better understand face recognition, it is necessary to identify not only which brain structures are implicated but also the dynamics of the neuronal activity in these structures. Latencies can then be compared to unravel the temporal dynamics of information processing at the distributed network level. To achieve high spatial and temporal resolut...

Amygdala involvement in facial negative emotion processing seems to be lateralized. The aim of the present study was to verify the existence of this phenomenon in the music domain and to study asymmetrical processing of emotions by the anteromedial temporal structures. Thirteen epileptic patients with left unilateral resection in the temporal lobe...

Temporal envelope processing in the human auditory cortex has an important role in language analysis. In this paper, depth recordings of local field potentials in response to amplitude modulated white noises were used to design maps of activation in primary, secondary and associative auditory areas and to study the propagation of the cortical activ...

The right and left anteromedial temporal lobes have been shown to participate in emotion processing. The aim of the study was to further address their role in music emotion perception/recognition, and assessment by two emotional determinants, i.e., arousal (relaxing versus stimulating aspects) and valence (pleasantness degree). Epileptic patients w...

There has recently been a growing interest in the use of simultaneous electroencephalography (EEG) and functional MRI (fMRI) for evoked activity in cognitive paradigms, thereby obtaining functional datasets with both high spatial and temporal resolution. The simultaneous recording permits obtaining event-related potentials (ERPs) and MR images in t...

The human auditory cortex includes several interconnected areas. A better understanding of the mechanisms involved in auditory cortical functions requires a detailed knowledge of neuronal connectivity between functional cortical regions. In human, it is difficult to track in vivo neuronal connectivity. We investigated the interarea connection in vi...

We report the case of a 49-year-old right-handed woman with brief partial seizures in which the clinical semiology was marked by an early humming automatism. MRI fusion of the registered ictal and interictal single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) substraction exhibited a left neural network involving lateral temporal, inferior frontal,...

Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to test for the lateralization of the brain regions specifically involved in the recognition of negatively and positively valenced musical emotions. The manipulation of two major musical features (mode and tempo), resulting in the variation of emotional perception along the happiness-sadness axis,...

Auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) were recorded from eight developmental dyslexic adults with persistent reading, spelling and phonological deficits, and 10 non-dyslexic controls to voiced (/ba/) and voiceless (/pa/) consonant-vowel syllables. Consistent with previous data, non-dyslexics coded these stimuli differentially according to the temporal...

Auditory-evoked potential (AEP)s elicited to French-language voiced stop consonant (/ba/) and voiceless stop consonant (/pa/) were studied in non-language-impaired epileptic patients and non-epileptic volunteers. First, depth AEPs recorded from the primary auditory cortex during pre-surgical exploration and scalp AEPs recordings using high resoluti...

The article presents a study of the influence of radio frequency (RF) fields emitted by mobile phones on human cerebral activity. Our work was based on the study of Auditory Evoked Potentials (AEPs) recorded on the scalp of healthy humans and epileptic patients. The protocol allowed us to compare AEPs recorded with or without exposure to RFs. To ge...

This study investigated the ability of cochlear-implanted patients to discriminate tone bursts in free field using the electrophysiological recordings of mismatch negativity (MMN). Seven cochlear-implanted patients (CIP) and eight control subjects (CS) were tested. Event-related potentials were recorded from either 32 or 64 electrodes in response t...

The paper presents a study of global system for mobile (GSM) phone radiofrequency effects on human cerebral activity. The work was based on the study of auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) recorded from healthy humans and epileptic patients. The protocol allowed the comparison of AEPs recorded with or without exposure to electrical fields. Ten variab...

The goal of this study was to determine the temporal response properties of different auditory cortical areas in humans. This is achieved by recording the phase-locked neural activity to white noises modulated sinusoidally in amplitude (AM) at frequencies between 4 and 128 Hz, in the left and right cortices of 20 subjects. Phase-locked neural respo...

Stop-consonant discrimination was investigated in normal-hearing listeners and cochlear-implanted patients (CIP) by recording auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) to /b epsilon/ and /p epsilon/ syllables. This study demonstrates that: (i) AEPs show time-locked components that mimic the temporal structure of the stimuli, indicating that both patients a...

The purpose of this work was to determine the characteristics of auditory events-related potentials in cochlear implanted patients (CIP) and to assess the relations between auditory abilities and the mismatch negativity (MMN). A multielectrode cap was placed on the scalp of 7 CIP and 8 normal-hearing listeners (NHL) in order to record the event-rel...

This chapter discusses the recordings of auditory evoked potentials as a measure to define the eloquent areas. Recordings of auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) to tone bursts, syllables, or complex sounds directly from the cerebral cortex allow a precise characterization of the functional auditory areas. The technique can be easily performed as a ro...

This paper deals with the study of the influence of radiofrequency fields emitted by mobile phones on human cerebral activity. Our work is carried out on the auditory system using auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) recorded on the scalp of healthy humans and epileptic patients. The protocol allows to compare the AEPs recorded with or without exposur...

Humming is a rare automatism occurring in partial seizures that has received little attention. Its study could shed light on the neural networks underlying melodic expression. In this study, we examined the anatomoelectroclinical correlates of humming during epileptic seizures Three patients undergoing presurgical stereoelectroencephalography (SEEG...

To compare the localizations of different neural sources (a) obtained from intracerebral evoked responses and (b) calculated from surface auditory evoked field responses recorded in the same subjects. Our aim was to evaluate the resolving power of a source localization method currently used in our laboratory, which is based on a recent spatio-tempo...