TY - JOUR

T1 - Tracking of pitch probabilities in congenital amusia

AU - Omigie, Diana

AU - Pearce, Marcus T

AU - Stewart, Lauren

N1 - Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

PY - 2012/6

Y1 - 2012/6

N2 - Auditory perception involves not only hearing a series of sounds but also making predictions about future ones. For typical listeners, these predictions are formed on the basis of long-term schematic knowledge, gained over a lifetime of exposure to the auditory environment. Individuals with a developmental disorder known as congenital amusia show marked difficulties with music perception and production. The current study investigated whether these difficulties can be explained, either by a failure to internalise the statistical regularities present in music, or by a failure to consciously access this information. Two versions of a melodic priming paradigm were used to probe participants' abilities to form melodic pitch expectations, in an implicit and an explicit manner. In the implicit version (Experiment 1), participants made speeded, forced-choice discriminations concerning the timbre of a cued target note. In the explicit version (Experiment 2), participants used a 1-7 rating scale to indicate the degree to which the pitch of the cued target note was expected or unexpected. Target notes were chosen to have high or low probability in the context of the melody, based on the predictions of a computational model of melodic expectation. Analysis of the data from the implicit task revealed a melodic priming effect in both amusic and control participants whereby both groups showed faster responses to high probability than low probability notes rendered in the same timbre as the context. However, analysis of the data from the explicit task revealed that amusic participants were significantly worse than controls at using explicit ratings to differentiate between high and low probability events in a melodic context. Taken together, findings from the current study make an important contribution in demonstrating that amusic individuals track melodic pitch probabilities at an implicit level despite an impairment, relative to controls, when required to make explicit judgments in this regard. However the unexpected finding that amusics nevertheless are able to use explicit ratings to distinguish between high and low probability notes (albeit not as well as controls) makes a similarly important contribution in revealing a sensitivity to musical structure that has not previously been demonstrated in these individuals.

AB - Auditory perception involves not only hearing a series of sounds but also making predictions about future ones. For typical listeners, these predictions are formed on the basis of long-term schematic knowledge, gained over a lifetime of exposure to the auditory environment. Individuals with a developmental disorder known as congenital amusia show marked difficulties with music perception and production. The current study investigated whether these difficulties can be explained, either by a failure to internalise the statistical regularities present in music, or by a failure to consciously access this information. Two versions of a melodic priming paradigm were used to probe participants' abilities to form melodic pitch expectations, in an implicit and an explicit manner. In the implicit version (Experiment 1), participants made speeded, forced-choice discriminations concerning the timbre of a cued target note. In the explicit version (Experiment 2), participants used a 1-7 rating scale to indicate the degree to which the pitch of the cued target note was expected or unexpected. Target notes were chosen to have high or low probability in the context of the melody, based on the predictions of a computational model of melodic expectation. Analysis of the data from the implicit task revealed a melodic priming effect in both amusic and control participants whereby both groups showed faster responses to high probability than low probability notes rendered in the same timbre as the context. However, analysis of the data from the explicit task revealed that amusic participants were significantly worse than controls at using explicit ratings to differentiate between high and low probability events in a melodic context. Taken together, findings from the current study make an important contribution in demonstrating that amusic individuals track melodic pitch probabilities at an implicit level despite an impairment, relative to controls, when required to make explicit judgments in this regard. However the unexpected finding that amusics nevertheless are able to use explicit ratings to distinguish between high and low probability notes (albeit not as well as controls) makes a similarly important contribution in revealing a sensitivity to musical structure that has not previously been demonstrated in these individuals.

KW - Acoustic Stimulation

KW - Adult

KW - Analysis of Variance

KW - Auditory Perceptual Disorders

KW - Auditory Threshold

KW - Female

KW - Humans

KW - Male

KW - Middle Aged

KW - Music

KW - Pitch Perception

KW - Probability

KW - Psychophysics

KW - Reaction Time

U2 - 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2012.02.034

DO - 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2012.02.034

M3 - Journal article

C2 - 22414591

VL - 50

SP - 1483

EP - 1493

JO - Neuropsychologia

JF - Neuropsychologia

SN - 0028-3932

IS - 7

ER -