PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Patrick Bermudez
AU  - Robert J. Zatorre
TI  - Conditional Associative Memory for Musical Stimuli in Nonmusicians: Implications for Absolute Pitch
AID  - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1560-05.2005
DP  - 2005 Aug 24
TA  - The Journal of Neuroscience
PG  - 7718--7723
VI  - 25
IP  - 34
4099  - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/25/34/7718.short
4100  - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/25/34/7718.full
SO  - J. Neurosci.2005 Aug 24; 25
AB  - A previous positron emission tomography (PET) study of musicians with and without absolute pitch put forth the hypothesis that the posterior dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is involved in the conditional associative aspect of the identification of a pitch. In the work presented here, we tested this hypothesis by training eight nonmusicians to associate each of four different complex musical sounds (triad chords) with an arbitrary number in a task designed to have limited analogy to absolute-pitch identification. Each subject under-went a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanning procedure both before and after training. Active condition (identification of chords)- control condition (amplitude-matched noise bursts) comparisons for the pretraining scan showed no significant activation maxima. The same comparison for the posttraining scan revealed significant peaks of activation in posterior dorsolateral prefrontal, ventrolateral prefrontal, and parietal areas. A conjunction analysis was performed to show that the posterior dorsolateral prefrontal activity in this study is similar to that observed in the aforementioned PET study. We conclude that the posterior dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is selectively involved in the conditional association aspect of our task, as it is in the attribution of a verbal label to a note by absolute-pitch musicians.