Author name cluster

Frédéric Assal

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

4 papers

1 author row

YNIMG Journal 2026 Journal Article

Influence of attention mechanisms on cerebellar and basal ganglia activity during vocal emotion decoding

Leonardo Ceravolo
Marine Thomasson
Ioana Medeleine Constantin
Emma Stiennon
Émilie Chassot
Jordan Pierce
Alexandre Cionca
Didier Grandjean

Emotional prosody processing involves a widespread network of brain regions, but the specific roles of the cerebellum and basal ganglia in explicit and implicit tasks are not well known or understood. This study investigated how the cerebellum and basal ganglia contribute to explicit (emotion categorization) and implicit (gender categorization) processing of emotional prosody, namely when attention is directly versus implicitly oriented towards the emotion of the voice stimuli, respectively. Twenty-eight healthy French-speaking participants (average age: 65 years old) underwent high-resolution functional MRI while performing explicit and implicit vocal emotion processing tasks. Neuroimaging results revealed-and replicated-that both tasks recruited a widespread network, including the superior temporal cortex, inferior frontal cortex, primary motor and somatosensory cortices, basal ganglia, and cerebellum. The explicit task elicited stronger activations in the basal ganglia (caudate nucleus, putamen) and cerebellar regions (Crus I/II, lobules VI, VIIb, and X), consistent with higher cognitive control demands. In contrast, the implicit task was associated with activations in cerebellar lobules IV-V, VI, VIII, and IX, along with the thalamus. Regression-based functional connectivity analyses further illustrate connectivity between the right cerebellar lobule IX and the putamen, as well as the cerebellar vermis (XII), particularly during implicit processing. These findings highlight the distinct contributions of the cerebellum and basal ganglia to emotional prosody processing, with explicit tasks engaging associative and cognitive control networks, while implicit tasks rely more on sensorimotor and automatic neural processing mechanisms.

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YNICL Journal 2021 Journal Article

Premotor and fronto-striatal mechanisms associated with presence hallucinations in dementia with Lewy bodies

Nicolas Nicastro
Giedre Stripeikyte
Frédéric Assal
Valentina Garibotto
Olaf Blanke

INTRODUCTION: presence hallucinations (PH) are frequent in dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), but their cortico-subcortical origin is unknown. Recent studies have defined key frontal and temporal areas contributing to the occurrence of PH (PH-network) and tested their relevance in subjects with Parkinson's disease (PD). With the present study, we aimed at disentangling the metabolic and dopaminergic correlates of pH as well as their relation to a recently defined PH brain network in DLB. METHODS: F-FDG PH-network regions as a seed. RESULTS: F-FDG decreases in PH + . DISCUSSION: these findings uncover the pivotal role of vPMC (involved in a PH-network) and its cortico-striatal connections in association with PH in DLB, improving our understanding of psychosis in neurodegeneration.

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YNICL Journal 2021 Journal Article

Sensory contribution to vocal emotion deficit in patients with cerebellar stroke

Marine Thomasson
Damien Benis
Arnaud Saj
Philippe Voruz
Roberta Ronchi
Didier Grandjean
Frédéric Assal
Julie Péron

In recent years, there has been increasing evidence of cerebellar involvement in emotion processing. Difficulties in the recognition of emotion from voices (i.e., emotional prosody) have been observed following cerebellar stroke. However, the interplay between sensory and higher-order cognitive dysfunction in these deficits, as well as possible hemispheric specialization for emotional prosody processing, has yet to be elucidated. We investigated the emotional prosody recognition performances of patients with right versus left cerebellar lesions, as well as of matched controls, entering the acoustic features of the stimuli in our statistical model. We also explored the cerebellar lesion-behavior relationship, using voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping. Results revealed impairment of vocal emotion recognition in both patient subgroups, particularly for neutral or negative prosody, with a higher number of misattributions in patients with right-hemispheric stroke. Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping showed that some emotional misattributions correlated with lesions in the right Lobules VIIb and VIII and right Crus I and II. Furthermore, a significant proportion of the variance in this misattribution was explained by acoustic features such as pitch, loudness, and spectral aspects. These results point to bilateral posterior cerebellar involvement in both the sensory and cognitive processing of emotions.

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YNICL Journal 2016 Journal Article

Hurt but still alive: Residual activity in the parahippocampal cortex conditions the recognition of familiar places in a patient with topographic agnosia

Mitsouko van Assche
Valeria Kebets
Ursula Lopez
Arnaud Saj
Rachel Goldstein
Françoise Bernasconi
Patrik Vuilleumier
Frédéric Assal

The parahippocampal cortex (PHC) participates in both perception and memory. However, the way perceptual and memory processes cooperate when we navigate in our everyday life environment remains poorly understood. We studied a stroke patient presenting a brain lesion in the right PHC, which resulted in a mild and quantifiable topographic agnosia, and allowed us to investigate the role of this structure in overt place recognition. Photographs of personally familiar and unfamiliar places were displayed during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Familiar places were either recognized or unrecognized by the patient and 6 age- and education-matched controls in a visual post-scan recognition test. In fMRI, recognized places were associated with a network comprising the fusiform gyrus in the intact side, but also the right anterior PHC, which included the lesion site. Moreover, this right PHC showed increased connectivity with the left homologous PHC in the intact hemisphere. By contrasting recognized with unrecognized familiar places, we replicate the finding of the joint involvement of the retrosplenial cortex, occipito-temporal areas, and posterior parietal cortex in place recognition. This study shows that the ability for left and right anterior PHC to communicate despite the neurological damage conditioned place recognition success in this patient. It further highlights a hemispheric asymmetry in this process, by showing the fundamental role of the right PHC in topographic agnosia.

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