Sebastien Paquette

Université de Montréal | UdeM · Department of Psychology

Consistent with previous reports, the prevalence of tinnitus was found to increase with age in all groups. The prevalence among the surgical patients (39 [23.5%]) was significantly higher than among the matched controls (33 [9.9%]) and participants with SRE (39 [11.7%]; P < .001; Figure). A sensitivity analysis, assuming that patients who did not r...

Whether emotions carried by voice and music are processed by the brain using similar mechanisms has long been investigated. Yet neuroimaging studies do not provide a clear picture, mainly due to lack of control over stimuli. Here, we report a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study using comparable stimulus material in the voice and musi...

Cochlear implants can successfully restore hearing in profoundly deaf individuals and enable speech comprehension. However, the acoustic signal provided is severely degraded and, as a result, many important acoustic cues for perceiving emotion in voices and music are unavailable. The deficit of cochlear implant users in auditory emotion processing...

From a baby's cry to a piece of music, we perceive emotion from our auditory environment every day. Many theories bring forward the concept of common neural substrates for the perception of vocal and musical emotions. It has been proposed that, for us to perceive emotions, music recruits emotional circuits that evolved for the processing of biologi...

The Montreal Battery for the Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA; Peretz, Champod, & Hyde, 2003) is an empirically-grounded quantitative tool that is widely used to identify individuals with congenital amusia. The use of such a standardized measure ensures that individuals tested conform to a specific neuropsychological profile, allowing for comparisons acr...

Understanding insincere language (sarcasm and teasing) is a fundamental part of communication and crucial for maintaining social relationships. This can be a challenging task for cochlear implant (CIs) users who receive degraded suprasegmental information important for perceiving a speaker's attitude. We measured the perception of speaker sincerity...

It has been suggested that tensor tympani muscle (TTM) contraction may be involved in the development of ear-related pathologies such as tinnitus, hyperacusis and otalgia, called the tonic tensor tympani syndrome (TTTS). However, as there is no precise measure of TTM function under normal and pathological states, its involvement remains speculative...

Objective: To determine the contributions of apraxia of speech (AOS) and anomia to conversational dysfluency. Methods: In this observational study of 52 patients with chronic aphasia, 47 with concomitant AOS, fluency was quantified using correct information units per minute (CIUs/min) from propositional speech tasks. Videos of patients performin...

Background Acquired prosopagnosia is often associated with other deficits, such as dyschromatopsia and topographagnosia, from damage to adjacent perceptual networks. A recent study showed that some subjects with developmental prosopagnosia also have congenital amusia, but problems with music perception have not been described in the acquired varian...

Studies of developmental prosopagnosia have often shown that developmental prosopagnosia differentially affects human face processing over non-face object processing. However, little consideration has been given to whether this condition is associated with perceptual or sensorimotor impairments in other modalities. Comorbidities have played a role...

Objective: Cochlear implants (CIs) restore a sense of hearing in deaf individuals. However, they do not transmit the acoustic signal with sufficient fidelity, leading to difficulties in recognizing emotions in voice and in music. The study aimed to explore the neurophysiological bases of these limitations. Design: Twenty-two adults (18 to 70 yea...

Nearly everyone is exposed to music on a daily basis and the human brain is equipped with the necessary neural architecture to naturally acquire musical abilities during early development. Despite the universality of music, a minority of individuals present with very specific musical deficits that cannot be attributed to a general auditory dysfunct...

Studies have shown subtle gray and white matter abnormalities in subjects with several developmental disorders including prosopagnosia, tone-deafness, and dyslexia. Correlational evidence suggests that tone-deafness and dyslexia tend to co-occur, suggesting a link between these two developmental disorders. However, it is not known whether tone-deaf...

Cochlear implants (CIs) partially restore the sense of hearing in the deaf. However, the ability to recognize emotions in speech and music is reduced due to the implant’s electrical signal limitations and the patient’s altered neural pathways. Electrophysiological correlations of these limitations are not yet well established. Here we aimed to char...

In human listeners, the temporal voice areas (TVAs) are regions of the superior temporal gyrus and sulcus that respond more to vocal sounds than a range of nonvocal control sounds, including scrambled voices, environmental noises, and animal cries. One interpretation of the TVA’s selectivity is based on low-level acoustic cues: compared to control...

From expert percussionists to individuals who cannot dance, there are widespread differences in people's abilities to perceive and synchronize with a musical beat. The aim of our study was to identify candidate brain regions that might be associated with these abilities. For this purpose, we used Voxel-Based-Morphometry to correlate inter-individua...

The Montreal Battery for the Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA; Peretz, Champod, & Hyde Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 999, 58-75, 2003) is an empirically grounded quantitative tool that is widely used to identify individuals with congenital amusia. The use of such a standardized measure ensures that the individuals tested will conform to a s...

Music and voice bear many similarities and share neural resources to some extent. Experience dependent plasticity provides a window into the neural overlap between these two domains. Here, we suggest that research on auditory deprived individuals whose hearing has been bionically restored offers a unique insight into the functional and structural o...

Results show that older adults with moderate training had the fastest neural timing in response to the [da] stimuli followed by the little and none groups, in both conditions (quiet and masked). The moderate group was also the most resistant to latency delays due to noise (masked condition). Group differences were only seen in the region (time fram...

In order to adjust to an ever-changing environment, our brain constantly constructs predictions for various inputs. The auditory system in particular has been shown to automatically use predictions to facilitate sequential processing.Predictive coding theories suppose that the brain extracts regularities to actively predict what is next. It is assu...

The Musical Emotional Bursts (MEB) consist of 80 brief musical executions expressing basic emotional states (happiness, sadness and fear) and neutrality. These musical bursts were designed to be the musical analog of the Montreal Affective Voices (MAV)-a set of brief non-verbal affective vocalizations portraying different basic emotions. The MEB co...

Please refer to: Gosselin, N., Paquette, S., & Peretz, I. (2015). Sensitivity to musical emotions in congenital amusia. Cortex, 71, 171-182.

The issue of emotional feelings to music is the object of a classic debate in music psychology. Emotivists argue that emotions are really felt in response to music, whereas cognitivists believe that music is only representative of emotions. Psychophysiological recordings of emotional feelings to music might help to resolve the debate, but past stud...

Recently, we pointed out that a small number of individuals fail to acquire basic musical abilities, and that these deficiencies might have neuronal and genetic underpinnings. Such a musical disorder is now termed "congenital amusia," an umbrella term for lifelong musical disabilities that cannot be attributed to mental retardation, deafness, or la...