Electrophysiological Correlates of Absolute Pitch in a Passive Auditory Oddball Paradigm: a Direct Replication Attempt

Abstract

Humans with absolute pitch (AP) are able to effortlessly name the pitch class of a sound without an external reference. The association of labels with pitches cannot be entirely suppressed even if it interferes with task demands. This suggests a high level of automaticity of pitch labeling in AP. The automatic nature of AP was further investigated in a study by Rogenmoser et al. (2015). Using a passive auditory oddball paradigm in combination with electroencephalography, they observed electrophysiological differences between musicians with and without AP in response to piano tones. Specifically, the AP musicians showed a smaller P3a, an event-related potential (ERP) component presumably reflecting early attentional processes. In contrast, they did not find group differences in the mismatch negativity (MMN), an ERP component associated with auditory memory processes. They concluded that early cognitive processes are facilitated in AP during passive listening and are more important for AP than the preceding sensory processes. In our direct replication study on a larger sample of musicians with (n = 54, 27 females, 27 males) and without (n = 50, 24 females, 26 males) AP, we successfully replicated the non-significant effects of AP on the MMN. However, we could not replicate the significant effects for the P3a. Additional Bayes factor analyses revealed moderate to strong evidence (Bayes factor > 3) for the null hypothesis for both MMN and P3a. Therefore, the results of this replication study do not support the postulated importance of cognitive facilitation in AP during passive tone listening.

Auditory T-Complex Reveals Reduced Neural Activities in the Right Auditory Cortex in Musicians With Absolute Pitch

“…The stimulus was a sinusoidal tone of 1046.5 Hz, which corresponded to the frequency of C6 (American notation). A single, fixed frequency was used, because the use of multiple frequencies introduces pitch changes, neural responses to which might confound the results by the mechanisms of neural adaptation and/or mismatch negativity (Tervaniemi et al, 1993; Elmer et al, 2015; Rogenmoser et al, 2015; Greber et al, 2018). With a repeated presentation of the note, the participants could perceive it as the keynote of the stimulus sequence, but it required AP to identify the specific note as we did not provide any information about the stimulus.…”

Auditory aversion in absolute pitch possessors

“…In EEG, this interference is reflected by a negative-going deflection around 400 ms after target-onset, which is referred to as the N400 (Kutas and Hillyard 1980;Zhang et al 2010). EEG has an excellent time resolution and has been insightful in capturing the early perceptual and cognitive processes underlying AP (Elmer et al 2013;Rogenmoser et al 2015;Greber et al 2018;Burkhard et al 2019;Leipold, Oderbolz, et al 2019). In the present study, the participants were instructed to judge as quickly and accurately as possible whether pictures (targets) were either pleasant or unpleasant by pressing one of two response buttons.…”

Suppression of Pitch Labeling: No Evidence for an Impact of Absolute Pitch on Behavioral and Neurophysiological Measures of Cognitive Inhibition in an Auditory Go/Nogo Task

“…As described above, group differences between AP and non-AP musicians in neurophysiological activity have been repeatedly observed during attentive listening. However, in several studies, the mismatch negativity, an ERP component evoked during passive listening in passive oddball tasks, did not differ between AP and non-AP musicians (Tervaniemi et al, 1993;Rogenmoser et al, 2015;Greber et al, 2018). Thus, the focus of attention could play a role in whether and to what extent subprocesses of pitch labeling and associated neurophysiological activations are automatically triggered by acoustic stimuli.…”