Brain mapping in emotional prosody in patients with drug-resistant temporal epilepsy, and indication of plasticity

OLANO, MARÍA A.; ELIZALDE ACEVEDO, BAUTISTA; ALBA-FERRARA, LUCÍA

Berlín

Seminario; Scientific Summer School organized by the Federation of the European Societies of Neuropsychology; 2020

Federation of the European Societies of Neuropsychology

Introduction: Emotional prosody, a suprasegmental component of language, is predominantly processed by right temporo-frontal areas of the cerebral cortex. In temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), brain disturbances affecting prosody processing frequently occur. This research assesses compensatory brain mechanisms of prosodic processing in refractory TLE using fMRI. Methods: Patients with focal unilateral epilepsy, right (RTLE) (N=19), left (LTLE) (N=19), and healthy controls (N=20) were evaluated by fMRI during a prosody decoding task. The stimuli consisted in spoken numbers with different tones of voice (joy, fear, anger and neutral, also including silent trials as a baseline) and participants were instructed to label the emotion with a keypad. A lateralization index (LI) was used to see the differences in the side of the peak of activation of each participant. Results: Behaviorally, The LTLE and RTLE groups did not differ significantly from each other neither from controls. Whole sample analysis of imaging data showed extensive activations in bilateral superior temporal gyrus, bilateral precentral and post-central gyrus, right putamen, left cerebellar vermis. Compared to the LTLE and controls, RTLE activated similar areas, but they differed in number of voxels and the z-score. Significant differences was found [F(2.55)=4.89,p