A behavior analysis of absolute pitch: sex, experience, and species

Weisman, Ronald G.; Njegovan, Milan; Williams, Mitchel T.; Cohen, Jerome; Sturdy, Christopher B.

doi:10.1016/j.beproc.2004.03.010

Cited by 48 publications

(50 citation statements)

References 41 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Our results indicate that behavioral effects tied classically to changes in the frequencies of pure tones (29,30,(37)(38)(39) should not be strictly interpreted as changes to the percept of pitch. Instead, we suggest a revised perspective on melody recognition by songbirds.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 81%

“…Here AP does not refer to the human ability to assign a note name or pitch chroma to a tone, such as "G sharp," but the more general ability to recognize tones on the basis of their AP height. This has been amply demonstrated in songbirds (38,39). (For pure tones, AP height corresponds to frequency, whereas for complex harmonic tones, it corresponds to fundamental frequency.)…”

mentioning

confidence: 90%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Songbirds use spectral shape, not pitch, for sound pattern recognition

Bregman

Patel

Gentner

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Humans easily recognize "transposed" musical melodies shifted up or down in log frequency. Surprisingly, songbirds seem to lack this capacity, although they can learn to recognize human melodies and use complex acoustic sequences for communication. Decades of research have led to the widespread belief that songbirds, unlike humans, are strongly biased to use absolute pitch (AP) in melody recognition. This work relies almost exclusively on acoustically simple stimuli that may belie sensitivities to more complex spectral features. Here, we investigate melody recognition in a species of songbird, the European Starling (Sturnus vulgaris), using tone sequences that vary in both pitch and timbre. We find that small manipulations altering either pitch or timbre independently can drive melody recognition to chance, suggesting that both percepts are poor descriptors of the perceptual cues used by birds for this task. Instead we show that melody recognition can generalize even in the absence of pitch, as long as the spectral shapes of the constituent tones are preserved. These results challenge conventional views regarding the use of pitch cues in nonhuman auditory sequence recognition.absolute pitch | songbirds | comparative cognition | pitch processing | pattern perception

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 81%

mentioning

confidence: 90%

Songbirds use spectral shape, not pitch, for sound pattern recognition

Bregman

Patel

Gentner

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In most of these experiments, sine-wave tonal stimuli increased in frequency on a simple linear scale, and thus were mistuned to human musical scales. Songbirds consistently discriminated between ranges more accurately than did either rats or humans (Weisman, Njegovan, Williams, Cohen, & Sturdy, 2004). An important feature of this procedure was that the rewarded and unrewarded ranges of tones alternated across frequencies, with at least three ranges (e.g., S−, S+, S−) and sometimes eight (e.g., S−, S+, S−, S+, S−, S+, S−, S+), presented during discrimination training.…”

Section: Octave Generalization and Transfer In Experiments 2 Andmentioning

confidence: 97%

Pitch chroma discrimination, generalization, and transfer tests of octave equivalence in humans

Hoeschele

Weisman

Sturdy

2012

Atten Percept Psychophys

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Octave equivalence occurs when notes separated by an octave (a doubling in frequency) are judged as being perceptually similar. Considerable evidence points to the importance of the octave in music and speech. Yet, experimental demonstration of octave equivalence has been problematic. Using go/no-go operant discrimination and generalization, we studied octave equivalence in humans. In Experiment 1, we found that a procedure that failed to show octave equivalence in European starlings also failed in humans. In Experiment 2, we modified the procedure to control for the effects of pitch height perception by training participants in Octave 4 and testing in Octave 5. We found that the pattern of responding developed by discrimination training in Octave 4 generalized to Octave 5. We replicated and extended our findings in Experiment 3 by adding a transfer phase: Participants were trained with either the same or a reversed pattern of rewards in Octave 5. Participants transferred easily to the same pattern of reward in Octave 5 but struggled to learn the reversed pattern. We provided minimal instruction, presented no ordered sequences of notes, and used only sine-wave tones, but participants nonetheless constructed pitch chroma information from randomly ordered sequences of notes. Training in music weakly hindered octave generalization but moderately facilitated both positive and negative transfer.

show abstract

“…Discrimination of/ra/-/la/speech continua show similarities in response latencies for stimuli along the entire length of the continua and a similar peak in discrimination performance, suggested to be the categorical boundary (Dooling et al, 1995). Weisman et al (2004) found similarities and high accuracy in absolute pitch discrimination in zebra finches and budgerigars. A recent study by Lohr et al (2006) highlighted the sensitivity of both species of birds at discriminating temporal fine structure of zebra finch call-like harmonic sounds.…”

Section: E-mail Address: Mdent@buffaloedu (Ml Dent)mentioning

confidence: 85%