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Expertise shapes domain‐specific functional cerebral asymmetry during mental imagery: the case of culinary arts and music
Author(s) -
Bensafi Moustafa,
Fournel Arnaud,
Joussain Pauline,
Poncelet Johan,
Przybylski Lauranne,
Rouby Catherine,
Tillmann Barbara
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
european journal of neuroscience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.346
H-Index - 206
eISSN - 1460-9568
pISSN - 0953-816X
DOI - 10.1111/ejn.13596
Subject(s) - mental image , psychology , stimulus modality , timbre , cognitive psychology , lateralization of brain function , musical , the arts , contrast (vision) , modalities , sensory system , cognition , neuroscience , visual arts , art , computer science , social science , artificial intelligence , sociology
Abstract Mental imagery in experts has been documented in visual arts, music and dance. Here, we examined this issue in an understudied art domain, namely, culinary arts. Previous research investigating mental imagery in experts has reported either a stronger involvement of the right hemisphere or bilateral brain activation. The first aim of our study was to examine whether culinary arts also recruit such a hemispheric pattern specifically during odor mental imagery. In a second aim, we investigated whether expertise effects observed in a given sensory domain transfer to another modality. We combined psychophysics and neurophysiology to study mental imagery in cooks, musicians and controls. We collected response times and event‐related potentials ( ERP ) while participants mentally compared the odor of fruits, the timbre of musical instruments and the size of fruits, musical instruments and manufactured objects. Cooks were faster in imagining fruit odors, and musicians were faster in imagining the timbre of musical instruments. These differences were not observed in control participants. This expertise effect was reflected in the ERP late positive complex ( LPC ): only experts showed symmetric bilateral activation, specifically when cooks imagined odors and when musicians imagined timbres. In contrast, the LPC was significantly greater in the left hemisphere than in the right hemisphere for non‐expert participants in all conditions. These findings suggest that sensory expertise does not involve transfer of mental imagery ability across modalities and highlight for the first time that olfactory expertise in cooks induces a balance of activations between hemispheres as does musical expertise in musicians.