Pitch direction ability predicts melodic perception in autism

Abstract

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) often present atypical auditory perception. Previous work has reported both enhanced low-level pitch discrimination and superior abilities to detect local pitch structure on higher-level melodic tasks in ASD. However, it is unclear how low and high levels of auditory perception are related in ASD or typical development (TD), or how this relationship might change across development and stimulus presentation rates. To these aims, in the present study, children with ASD and TD were tested on a low-level pitch direction discrimination task and a high-level melodic global-local task. Groups performed similarly on both of these auditory tasks. Moreover, individual differences in low-level pitch direction ability predicted performance on the higher-level global-local task, with a stronger relationship in ASD. Age did not affect the relationship between low-level and high-level pitch performance in either ASD or TD. However, there was a more positive effect of age on the high-level global-local task performance in TD than ASD. Finally, there was no effect of stimulus rate on the relationship between low-level and high-level pitch performance in either group. These findings provide a better understanding of how perception is associated across levels of processing in ASD versus TD. This work helps to better understand individual differences in auditory perception and to refine ASD phenotypes.

A Tendency Towards Details? Inconsistent Results on Auditory and Visual Local-To-Global Processing in Absolute Pitch Musicians

“…Therefore, not all global-to-local paradigms might be adequate to measure holistic perception in terms of Gestalt principles (Wertheimer, 1925). Furthermore, even evidence on a reduced global precedence effect as a result of a more detail-oriented perception in autism is contradictory (Ozonoff et al, 1994; Mottron et al, 1999, 2000, 2003; Foxton et al, 2003; Germain et al, 2018).…”

“…Again, people with autism spectrum disorders showed a detailed-oriented style in this auditory experiment on cognitive style (Bouvet et al, 2014). However, other authors were not able to replicate a detail-oriented performance of autistic people on hierarchical stimuli (e.g., Mottron et al, 1999, 2003; Foxton et al, 2003; Germain et al, 2018). It is currently under debate if this is caused by variations in experimental setup, variations among autistic people or failure of the theory.…”

An Exploratory Study of Imagining Sounds and “Hearing” Music in Autism

“…Forms of music therapy have been reported to aid people with severe ASD significantly improve in musical skill in different ways, such as short/long melody recall and rhythm reproduction (Boso et al 2007). However, while some results are consistent with this idea of enhanced musical ability in autism, with reports of increased low-level pitch processing (Bonnel et al 2003), enhanced short-and long-term pitch memory (Stanutz et al 2014), and superior musical processing abilities in ASD (Jiang et al 2015; Molnar-Szakacs and Heaton 2012), a few more recent studies have also found normal (Germain et al 2019) or impaired (Sota et al 2018) performance on pitch discrimination and melodic perception in individuals with ASD. This discrepancy may partly be explained by differences in autism severity between the tested samples: those with enhanced musical abilities tend to have language delay or impairments and those with normal musical processing are generally high functioning (Bonnel et al 2010;Heaton et al 2008;Jones et al 2009;Mayer et al 2016).…”

A través de los ojos del niño con trastorno del espectro autista

“…Casi el 80 % de los estímulos que percibimos son visuales. Los niños con TEA, no suelen presentar problemas en los órganos de la visión o la audición, pero, sin embargo, la forma en la que procesan la información, y la integran con otros sentidos, es diferente (Bhaskaran, Lawrence, Flora & Perumalsamy, 2018;Germain et al, 2018), con lo cual la percepción de la realidad y la respuesta es también diferente. Se fijan en pequeños detalles, que para cualquier otro pueden pasar desapercibidos, gravándolos con total precisión, pero, sin embargo, no procesan adecuadamente la visión espacial del conjunto de un objeto, espacio o situación, lo cual les crea confusión, en ocasiones deben hacer un barrido región por región para poder reconocer y procesar la información que están recibiendo (Lowe, Stevenson, Barense, Cant & Ferber, 2018;Nilsson Jobs et al, 2018).…”