Dr Lauren Stewart BSc MSc PhD
Position held:
Senior Lecturer and Co-director of the MSc in Music, Mind and Brain
Phone:
+44 (0)20 7919 7195
Fax:
+44 (0)20 7919 7873
Email:
l.stewart (@gold.ac.uk)
Room 202/3 Whitehead Building
Department of Psychology
Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross, London, SE14 6NW
Office hours:
By appointment
Teaching
Television and video output
Times Online: “Hooked on music: can’t get you out of my head”. Guest blog (26/07/2010).
Imagine: “Tales of Music and the Brain”. Episode of BBC TV series (03/06/2008).
Guardian: “Melody Faker” (25/07/07)
Sunday Times (Irish Edition): “‘A Musical Family Born out of Tune” (10/06/2007)
BBC Radio 4 Frontiers: Interview on Musical Disorders (13/12/2006)
BBC Radio 4 Material World: Interview on Amusia (12/01/2006)
New York Public Radio Soundcheck: Interview about Amusia (18/10/2005)
BBC World Service World Today: Interview about Amusia (3/10/2005)
Research interests
My current research falls broadly within the two following areas:
Fractionating the Musical Mind: Insights from Congenital Amusia
A small percentage of the population report a lifelong failure to recognize familiar tunes or tell one tune from another, frequently complain that music sounds like a “din” and often avoid the many social situations in which music plays a crucial role. Such individuals, termed ‘congenitally amusic’, have lifelong difficulties with music and perform poorly on a standardized battery of musical listening tasks (Peretz, 2003). This disorder provides us with the opportunity to investigate the cognitive architecture of music, and its relation to other domains, such as language and spatial cognition. Using a large group of congenitally amusic individuals, recruited via an online musical listening test (www.delosis.com/listening/home.html), my present research aims to elucidate precisely which perceptual and cognitive mechanisms are at fault in amusia, whether disordered musical processing has implications for language and the extent to which such difficulties can impact upon sociocultural and affective functioning. This work is carried out in collaboration with Professor Tim Griffiths at Newcastle University and is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
Musicians as a Model of Neuroplasticity
Professional pianists must bimanually co-ordinate the production of up to 1800 notes per minute, integrate auditory and sensori-motor information and constantly monitor for errors in performance. The development of these cognitive abilities is the result of intense practise from an early age and provides an ideal model for investigating learning-induced plasticity. My work has focused specifically on the acquisition of musical literacy, asking questions about the cognitive representation of musical notation and the changes that occur in the brain as musical notation goes from being an impenetrable jumble of dots and lines, into a meaningful code for performance. I am currently interested in examining auditory-motor interactions in trained musicians.
Selected publications
Omigie, Diana and Stewart, Lauren. 2011. Preserved Statistical Learning of Tonal and Linguistic Material in Congenital Amusia. Frontiers in Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience, 2(109), pp. 1-11. [Article]
Stewart, Lauren. 2011. Characterizing Congenital Amusia. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64(4), pp. 625-638. ISSN 1747-0218 [Article]
Banissy, Michael J., Stewart, Lauren, Griffiths, Timothy D., Muggleton, Neil G, Walsh, Vincent, Ward, Jamie and Kanai, Ryota. 2011. Grapheme-color and tone-color synaesthesia is associated with structural brain changes in visual regions implicated in colour, form and motion. Cognitive Neuroscience, na. [Article]
Williamson, V.J., Cocchini, Gianna and Stewart, Lauren. 2011. The relationship between pitch and space in congenital amusia. Brain and Cognition, 76(1), pp. 70-76. [Article]
Overath, Tobias, Kumar, Sukhbinder, Stewart, Lauren, von Kriegstein, Katharina, Cusack, Rhodri, Rees, Adrian and Griffiths, Timothy D.. 2010. Cortical Mechanisms for the Segregation and Representation of Acoustic Textures. Journal of Neuroscience, 30(6), pp. 2070-2076. ISSN 0270-6474 [Article]
Olakunbi, Deborah, Bamiou, Doris-Eva, Stewart, Lauren and Luxon, Linda M.. 2010. Evaluation of musical skills in children with a diagnosis of an auditory processing disorder. International Journal of Pediatric Otorhinolaryngology, 74(6), pp. 633-636. ISSN 01655876 [Article]
Stewart, Lauren, Griffiths, Timothy D., Deutsch, Diana, McDonald, Claire and Williamson, Victoria J.. 2010. Faster decline of pitch memory over time in congenital amusia. Advances in Cognitive Psychology, 6(1), pp. 15-22. ISSN 1895-1171 [Article]
Liu, Fang, Patel, Aniruddh, Fourcin, Adrian and Stewart, Lauren. 2010. Intonation processing in congenital amusia: discrimination, identification and imitation. Brain, 133(6), pp. 1682-1693. ISSN 0006-8950 [Article]
Williamson, Victoria Jane and Stewart, Lauren. 2010. Memory for pitch in congenital amusia: Beyond a fine-grained pitch discrimination problem. Memory, 18(6), pp. 657-669. ISSN 0965-8211 [Article]
Stewart, Lauren. 2009. Lost in music. The Psychologist, 22(12), pp. 1030-1033. ISSN 0952-8229 [Article]
Garrido, Lucia, Eisner, Frank, McGettigan, Carolyn, Stewart, Lauren, Sauter, Disa, Hanley, J. Richard, Schweinberger, Stefan, Warren, Jason D. and Duchaine, Brad. 2009. Developmental phonagnosia: A selective deficit of vocal identity recognition. Neuropsychologia, 47(1), pp. 123-131. ISSN 00283932 [Article]
Stewart, Lauren, Kriegstein von, Katharina, Dalla Bella , Simone, Warren, Jason D. and Griffiths, Timothy D.. 2008. Disorders of musical cognition. In: Susan Hallam, Ian Cross and Michael Thaut, eds. Oxford handbook of music psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 184-196. ISBN 978-0-19-929845-7 [Book Section]
Stewart, Lauren. 2008. Do musicians have different brains? Clinical medicine, 8(3), pp. 304-308. ISSN 1470-2118 [Article]
Stewart, Lauren. 2008. Fractionating the musical mind: insights from congenital amusia. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 18(2), pp. 127-130. ISSN 09594388 [Article]
Stewart, Lauren. 2008. Music reading: a cognitive neuroscience approach. In: Tim Miles, John Westcombe and Diana Ditchfield, eds. Music and dyslexia: a positive approach. Chichester: Wiley, pp. 162-170. ISBN 978-0-470-06557-0 [Book Section]
Stewart, Lauren, Overath, Tobias, Warren, Jason D., Foxton, Jessica M. and Griffiths, Timothy D.. 2008. fMRI Evidence for a Cortical Hierarchy of Pitch Pattern Processing. PLoS ONE, 3(1), e1470. [Article]
McDonald, Claire and Stewart, Lauren. 2008. Uses and functions of music in congential amusia. Music Perception, 25(4), pp. 345-355. ISSN 0730-7829 [Article]
Stewart, Lauren and Williamon, Aaron. 2008. What are the implications of neuroscience for musical education? Educational Research, 50(2), pp. 177-186. ISSN 0013-1881 [Article]
Stewart, Lauren and Walsh, Vincent. 2007. Music perception: sounds lost in space. Current Biology, 17(20), R892-R893. ISSN 09609822 [Article]
Stewart, Lauren and Walsh, Vincent. 2006. Transcranial magnetic stimulation in human cognition. In: Carl Senior, Tamara Russell and Michael S. Gazzaniga, eds. Methods in mind. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, pp. 1-26. ISBN 0-262-19541-0 [Book Section]
Stewart, Lauren. 2005. A neurocognitive approach to music reading. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1060(1), pp. 377-386. ISSN 0077-8923 [Article]
Stewart, Lauren and Walsh, Vincent. 2005. Infant learning: music and the baby brain. Current Biology, 15(21), R882-R884. ISSN 09609822 [Article]
Stewart, Lauren. 2005. Neurocognitive studies of musical literacy acquisition. Musicae Scientae, 9(2), pp. 223-237. [Article]
Stewart, Lauren. 2004. Through the eyes of a child. New Scientist(2449), pp. 52-53. ISSN 0262-4079 [Article]
Stewart, Lauren. 2004. Tuning the musical brain. Piano professional, pp. 9-13. [Article]
Ellison, Amanda, Stewart, Lauren, Cowey, Alan and Walsh, Vincent. 2003. Magnetic stimulation in studies of vision and attention. In: Manfred Fahle and Mark Greenlee, eds. The neuropsychology of vision. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 163-176. ISBN 9780198505822 [Book Section]
Stewart, Lauren, Frith, Uta, Henson, Rik and Walsh, Vincent. 2003. Brain changes after learning to read and play music. NeuroImage, 20(1), pp. 71-83. ISSN 10538119 [Article]
Backhouse , G., Bishop- Liebler, P., Frith, U. and Stewart, Lauren. 2003. Music, dyslexia and the brain. PATOSS, 162, pp. 9-14. [Article]
Stewart, Lauren. 2001. Attending and intending. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5(7), p. 284. ISSN 1364-6613 [Article]
Stewart, Lauren, Walsh, Vincent, Frith, Uta and Rothwell, John. 2001. TMS produces two dissociable types of speech disruption. NeuroImage, 13(3), pp. 472-478. ISSN 1053-8119 [Article]
Stewart, Lauren and Walsh, Vincent. 2001. Neuropsychology: music of the hemispheres. Current Biology, 11(4), pp. 125-127. ISSN 0960-9822 [Article]