Harmonic priming in an amusic patient: The power of implicit tasks

Abstract

Our study investigated with an implicit method (i.e., priming paradigm) whether I.R. - a brain-damaged patient exhibiting severe amusia - processes implicitly musical structures. The task consisted in identifying one of two phonemes (Experiment 1) or timbres (Experiment 2) on the last chord of eight-chord sequences (i.e., target). The targets were harmonically related or less related to the prior chords. I.R. displayed harmonic priming effects: Phoneme and timbre identification was faster for related than for less related targets (Experiments 1 and 2). However, I.R.'s explicit judgements of completion for the same sequences did not differ between related and less related contexts (Experiment 3). Her impaired performance in explicit judgements was not due to general difficulties with task demands since she performed like controls for completion judgements on spoken sentences (Experiment 4). The findings indicate that implicit knowledge of musical structures might remain intact and accessible, even when explicit judgements and overt recognition have been lost.

Impaired Explicit Processing of Musical Syntax and Tonality in a Group of Mandarin-Speaking Congenital Amusics

“…Employing both implicit and explicit tasks, however, Omigie, Pearce, and Stewart (2012) reported that amusic individuals were impaired at differentiating between high and low probability melodic events, despite intact implicit processing. The dissociation between implicit and explicit performance of musical structure has also been reported for individuals with acquired 6 amusia (Peretz, 1993;Tillmann, Peretz, Bigand, & Gosselin, 2007). These findings suggest that these two forms of knowledge are accessed using independent strategies.…”

Influence of a tone’s tonal function on temporal change detection

“…Indirect investigation methods provide powerful tools to reveal implicit knowledge, most particularly for patients with impaired explicit knowledge. This advantage of implicit processing is an established finding in neuro psychological research, which has been observed, among others, for face perception (see, e.g., Young, Hellawell, & de Haan, 1988), language processing (e.g., Mimura, Goodglass, & Milberg, 1996), and more recently, music perception (Tillmann, Peretz, Bigand, & Gosselin, 2007). The experimental paradigm introduced by our study, which combines temporal and tonal processing, will allow us to further investigate implicit tonal knowledge in amusic patients and congenital amusics.…”

“…5 Although impaired in pitch change detection, congenital amusics succeed in temporal change detection (Hyde & Peretz, 2004). Our task should allow testing of whether congenital amusics' sparse implicit tonal knowledge (revealed by the musical priming paradigm; see Tillmann, Peretz, et al, 2007) is sufficiently elaborated to process the different tonal degrees. Of particular interest would be the opposition between tonic and leading tone, which resulted in a strong (and for 40-msec trials, inverse) response bias for healthy listeners.…”

Perception of Tonal and Temporal Structures in Chord Sequences by Patients With Cerebellar Damage

“…This extension tested whether musical structure processing can be observed not only with implicit testing methods (i.e., the priming paradigm), but also with explicit ones. Recently, the musical priming paradigm revealed some preserved implicit knowledge in a case of severe amusia, while explicit music processing (i.e., as measured with subjective completion judgments) was impaired (Tillmann, Peretz, Bigand, & Gosselin, 2007). The time dimension in music refers to the organization of event-onset intervals leading to rhythmic patterns and to the sensation of meter (i.e., regular succession of strong and weak beats), with isochronous sequences being the simplest version of these regularities.…”