The relationship between pitch and space in congenital amusia

Williamson, Victoria J.; Cocchini, Gianna; Stewart, Lauren

doi:10.1016/j.bandc.2011.02.016

Cited by 29 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 40 publications

(47 reference statements)

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“…Previous research results considering this association are somewhat contradictory: congenital amusics may have lower than average abilities in visuospatial processing (Douglas and Bilkey, 2007) but this effect has not been replicated (Tillmann et al, 2010; Williamson et al, 2011). In the present study the hypothesis was investigated by creating a visuospatial task that was analogous to the Scale subtest of the MBEA.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…Moreover, congenital amusics have been found to have below average performance in a mental rotation task (Douglas and Bilkey, 2007), although this finding has not been replicated (Tillmann et al, 2010). Williamson et al (2011) found that a subgroup of amusics were slower but as accurate as the control group in the mental rotation task, but did not find any group differences in a range of other visuospatial tasks. Douglas and Bilkey (2007) also found that the stimulus-response compatibility effect was not as strong in amusics as in the control group.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

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Music and speech prosody: a common rhythm

et al. 2013

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Disorders of music and speech perception, known as amusia and aphasia, have traditionally been regarded as dissociated deficits based on studies of brain damaged patients. This has been taken as evidence that music and speech are perceived by largely separate and independent networks in the brain. However, recent studies of congenital amusia have broadened this view by showing that the deficit is associated with problems in perceiving speech prosody, especially intonation and emotional prosody. In the present study the association between the perception of music and speech prosody was investigated with healthy Finnish adults (n = 61) using an on-line music perception test including the Scale subtest of Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia (MBEA) and Off-Beat and Out-of-key tasks as well as a prosodic verbal task that measures the perception of word stress. Regression analyses showed that there was a clear association between prosody perception and music perception, especially in the domain of rhythm perception. This association was evident after controlling for music education, age, pitch perception, visuospatial perception, and working memory. Pitch perception was significantly associated with music perception but not with prosody perception. The association between music perception and visuospatial perception (measured using analogous tasks) was less clear. Overall, the pattern of results indicates that there is a robust link between music and speech perception and that this link can be mediated by rhythmic cues (time and stress).

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Music and speech prosody: a common rhythm

et al. 2013

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“…People with amusia (i.e., an impaired ability to discriminate pitch) have corresponding spatial deficits in some reports (Douglas & Bilkey, 2007), but others have failed to replicate the association (Tillman et al, 2010;Williamson, Cocchini, & Stewart, 2011). People have been found to map musical pitch to vertical spatial locations (Pratt, 1930;Rusconi, Kwan, Giordano, Umiltà, & Butterworth, 2006), but they are also willing to map it to psychophysical luminosity and loudness (Hubbard, 1996;McDermott, Lehr, & Oxenham, 2008), and to words denoting emotion, size, sweetness, texture and temperature (Eitan & Timmers, 2010;Walker & Smith, 1984).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do you see what I’m singing? Visuospatial movement biases pitch perception

Connell

Cai

Holler

2013

Brain and Cognition

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The nature of the connection between musical and spatial processing is controversial. While pitch may be described in spatial terms such as "high" or "low", it is unclear whether pitch and space are associated but separate dimensions or whether they share representational and processing resources. In the present study, we asked participants to judge whether a target vocal note was the same as (or different from) a preceding cue note. Importantly, target trials were presented as video clips where a singer sometimes gestured upward or downward while singing that target note, thus providing an alternative, concurrent source of spatial information. Our results show that pitch discrimination was significantly biased by the spatial movement in gesture. These effects were eliminated by spatial memory load but preserved under verbal memory load conditions. Together, our findings suggest that pitch and space have a shared representation such that the mental representation of pitch is audiospatial in nature.

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“…The present study was aimed to investigate the involvement of the cerebellum in the association between spatial and musical domains because this structure appears to play a role in visuo-spatial as well as musical perception. Since in previous studies mental rotation tasks have been used to test for a correlation between spatial and musical abilities [16], [17], in the present research we tested the performances in mental rotation (MR) tasks of healthy adult subjects passively listening Mozart’s Sonata K.448 in the presence or in the absence of continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) applied to the left cerebellar hemisphere. Although bilateral cerebellar activations have been observed in both musical [6] and mental rotation tasks [18], to transiently down-regulate the neuronal excitability [19], [20] the cTBS was applied on the left hemisphere, because the activation of left lateral crus I is reported to be associated with the presentation of auditory stimuli [21], [22] and during mental rotation tasks [10], [15].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Continuous Theta Burst Stimulation (cTBS) on Left Cerebellar Hemisphere Affects Mental Rotation Tasks during Music Listening

et al. 2013

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Converging evidence suggests an association between spatial and music domains. A cerebellar role in music-related information processing as well as in spatial-temporal tasks has been documented. Here, we investigated the cerebellar role in the association between spatial and musical domains, by testing performances in embodied (EMR) or abstract (AMR) mental rotation tasks of subjects listening Mozart Sonata K.448, which is reported to improve spatial-temporal reasoning, in the presence or in the absence of continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) of the left cerebellar hemisphere. In the absence of cerebellar cTBS, music listening did not influence either MR task, thus not revealing a “Mozart Effect”. Cerebellar cTBS applied before musical listening made subjects faster (P = 0.005) and less accurate (P = 0.005) in performing the EMR but not the AMR task. Thus, cerebellar inhibition by TBS unmasked the effect of musical listening on motor imagery. These data support a coupling between music listening and sensory-motor integration in cerebellar networks for embodied representations.

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The relationship between pitch and space in congenital amusia

Cited by 29 publications

References 40 publications

Music and speech prosody: a common rhythm

Music and speech prosody: a common rhythm

Do you see what I’m singing? Visuospatial movement biases pitch perception

Continuous Theta Burst Stimulation (cTBS) on Left Cerebellar Hemisphere Affects Mental Rotation Tasks during Music Listening

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