Perception and action de-coupling in congenital amusia: Sensitivity to task demands

Williamson, Victoria J.; Liu, Fang; Peryer, Guy; Grierson, Mick

doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2011.11.015

Cited by 29 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…Given that amusia has been characterized as a deficit of awareness (Paquette, Goulet, & Rothermich, 2013;Peretz, Brattico, J€ arvenp€ a€ a, & Tervaniemi, 2009), the level of explicit awareness of pitch information required for the task may play an important role. However, many studies have reported mixed results regarding whether amusics find direction tasks more difficult than detection tasks (Liu et al, 2013;Liu et al, 2010;Williamson, Liu, Peryer, Grierson, & Stewart, 2012), and the weight of the evidence here indicates that amusics have equal difficulty with change detection and direction tasks. Additionally, all the tasks assessed by our meta-analysis were explicit ones, and it may be that a small difference in degree of explicitness is not enough to elicit effect size differences between change detection and direction tasks across studies.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 58%

Meta-analytic evidence for the non-modularity of pitch processing in congenital amusia

Vuvan

Nunes-Silva

Peretz

2015

Cortex

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A major theme driving research in congenital amusia is related to the modularity of this musical disorder, with two possible sources of the amusic pitch perception deficit. The first possibility is that the amusic deficit is due to a broad disorder of acoustic pitch processing that has the effect of disrupting downstream musical pitch processing, and the second is that amusia is specific to a musical pitch processing module. To interrogate these hypotheses, we performed a meta-analysis on two types of effect sizes contained within 42 studies in the amusia literature: the performance gap between amusics and controls on tasks of pitch discrimination, broadly defined, and the correlation between specifically acoustic pitch perception and musical pitch perception. To augment the correlation database, we also calculated this correlation using data from 106 participants tested by our own research group. We found strong evidence for the acoustic account of amusia. The magnitude of the performance gap was moderated by the size of pitch change, but not by whether the stimuli were composed of tones or speech. Furthermore, there was a significant correlation between an individual's acoustic and musical pitch perception. However, individual cases show a double dissociation between acoustic and musical processing, which suggests that although most amusic cases are probably explainable by an acoustic deficit, there is heterogeneity within the disorder. Finally, we found that tonal language fluency does not influence the performance gap between amusics and controls, and that there was no evidence that amusics fare worse with pitch direction tasks than pitch discrimination tasks. These results constitute a quantitative review of the current literature of congenital amusia, and suggest several new directions for research, including the experimental induction of amusic behaviour through transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and the systematic exploration of the developmental trajectory of this disorder.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 58%

Meta-analytic evidence for the non-modularity of pitch processing in congenital amusia

Vuvan

Nunes-Silva

Peretz

2015

Cortex

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“…For pitch direction discrimination, given that pitch glide is rarely applied to musical works, the current study required participants to discriminate the pitch change direction between two separate pitches to examine pitch direction perception, and did not employ pitch glide as previous studies did [13,32,41]. Consistent with previous studies [13,18,41], the current data showed that amusics exhibited higher pitch direction thresholds than the controls, although this is not always found [32]. This discrepancy between the study by Williamson and Stewart [32] and the current study may be primarily due to the difference of experimental stimuli (i.e., pitch glide used in the former, and segmented tone pair used in the current study).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Difficulties with Pitch Discrimination Influences Pitch Memory Performance: Evidence from Congenital Amusia

et al. 2013

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Music processing is influenced by pitch perception and memory. Additionally these features interact, with pitch memory performance decreasing as the perceived distance between two pitches decreases. This study examined whether or not the difficulty of pitch discrimination influences pitch retention by testing individuals with congenital amusia. Pitch discrimination difficulty was equated by determining an individual’s threshold with a two down one up staircase procedure and using this to create conditions where two pitches (the standard and the comparison tones) differed by 1x, 2x, and 3x the threshold setting. For comparison with the literature a condition that employed a constant pitch difference of four semitones was also included. The results showed that pitch memory performance improved as the discrimination between the standard and the comparison tones was made easier for both amusic and control groups, and more importantly, that amusics did not show any pitch retention deficits when the discrimination difficulty was equated. In contrast, consistent with previous literature, amusics performed worse than controls when the physical pitch distance was held constant at four semitones. This impaired performance has been interpreted as evidence for pitch memory impairment in the past. However, employing a constant pitch distance always makes the difference closer to the discrimination threshold for the amusic group than for the control group. Therefore, reduced performance in this condition may simply reflect differences in the perceptual difficulty of the discrimination. The findings indicate the importance of equating the discrimination difficulty when investigating memory.

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“…However, this study aimed to assess the general association between musical skills and phonological abilities, and not in the diagnosis of congenital amusia per se . Therefore, we applied the accuracy here as previous studies used324260. In order to exclude dyslexic participants, any participant who scored more than 1.5 SD below the norm mean of the composite index on the second edition of the Test of Word Reading Efficiency (TOWRE-2)61 was not included.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Pitch discrimination associated with phonological awareness: Evidence from congenital amusia

Sun

et al. 2017

Sci Rep

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Research suggests that musical skills are associated with phonological abilities. To further investigate this association, we examined whether phonological impairments are evident in individuals with poor music abilities. Twenty individuals with congenital amusia and 20 matched controls were assessed on a pure-tone pitch discrimination task, a rhythm discrimination task, and four phonological tests. Amusic participants showed deficits in discriminating pitch and discriminating rhythmic patterns that involve a regular beat. At a group level, these individuals performed similarly to controls on all phonological tests. However, eight amusics with severe pitch impairment, as identified by the pitch discrimination task, exhibited significantly worse performance than all other participants in phonological awareness. A hierarchical regression analysis indicated that pitch discrimination thresholds predicted phonological awareness beyond that predicted by phonological short-term memory and rhythm discrimination. In contrast, our rhythm discrimination task did not predict phonological awareness beyond that predicted by pitch discrimination thresholds. These findings suggest that accurate pitch discrimination is critical for phonological processing. We propose that deficits in early-stage pitch discrimination may be associated with impaired phonological awareness and we discuss the shared role of pitch discrimination for processing music and speech.

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Perception and action de-coupling in congenital amusia: Sensitivity to task demands

Cited by 29 publications

References 34 publications

Meta-analytic evidence for the non-modularity of pitch processing in congenital amusia

Meta-analytic evidence for the non-modularity of pitch processing in congenital amusia

Difficulties with Pitch Discrimination Influences Pitch Memory Performance: Evidence from Congenital Amusia

Pitch discrimination associated with phonological awareness: Evidence from congenital amusia

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