Clinical Trial: Brain Areas Involved in Sound and Spoken Word Memory

Study Status: Terminated
Recruit Status: Terminated
Study Type: Observational

Official Title: The Role of the Inferior Frontal Gyrus in Long-Term Auditory Memory a rTMS Study

Brief Summary:

Background:

- Studies have shown that animals such as monkeys and dogs have excellent sight and touch memory but perform poorly on sound memory tasks. Human brains have certain areas that are important for speaking and understanding language. These areas may be involved in sound and spoken word memory. Researchers want to study these areas of the brain to find out if the memory for sounds requires brain structures that are usually associated with language learning and are unique to humans.

Objectives:

- To use magnetic resonance imaging to study areas of the brain involved in sound memory.

Eligibility:

- Healthy right-handed volunteers between 18 and 50 years of age. They must be native English speakers and have completed high school.

Design:

  • The study requires a screening visit and 1 or 2 study visits to the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center.
  • At the screening visit, volunteers will have a medical history taken. They will also have physical and neurological exams, and complete a questionnaire. Women of childbearing age will give a urine sample. Participants who have not had a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan in the past year will have one at this visit.
  • At the second visit, participants will have tests of sound memory. They will listen to a set of nonsense words spoken through earphones and memorize the words. Then they will listen to the words again to judge if the words were part of the earlier list. Participants will have a 1 hour break, then do the sound me

    Detailed Summary:

    Objective:

    Humans are the only animals that use language to communicate with each other. Among many other requirements, humans need excellent auditory long-term memory to be able to master the complicated task of learning a language. It is still not completely understood which brain regions are involved in transferring auditory stimuli into long-term memory. The goal of this research proposal is to examine whether brain structures that are known to be essential in language production also play an important role in encoding auditory stimuli into long-term memory.

    Study population:

    We propose using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to examine the role of

    frontal and temporo-parietal cortical areas in the storage of auditory stimuli in long-term memory. The whole study will comprise three experiments. Each of the three experiments will consist of one to three sessions. Sessions 1 and 2 will be compulsory in every experiment. Session 3 will only be required if positive results are obtained in session 2. Every participant can only participate in one of the three planned experiments.

    In Experiment 1, we will investigate the potential role of Broca s area in auditory memory. If we find that rTMS in Broca s area interferes with performance on the memory task, we will conduct a control (session 3) to determine whether or not the impairment was actually due to interference with stimulus perception rather than with memory, per se. We will conduct Experiment 2 to investigate the possible role of Wernicke s region in auditory memory. We will conduct Experiment 3 to investigate the role of the ventral premotor cortex (PMv) in auditory memory.