Use of explicit priming to phenotype absolute pitch ability

Abstract

Musicians with absolute pitch (AP) can name the pitch of a musical note in isolation. Expression of this unusual ability is thought to be influenced by heritability, early music training and current practice. However, our understanding of factors shaping its expression is hampered by testing and scoring methods that treat AP as dichotomous. These fail to capture the observed variability in pitch-naming accuracy among reported AP possessors. The aim of this study was to trial a novel explicit priming paradigm to explore phenotypic variability of AP. Thirty-five musically experienced individuals (Mage = 29 years, range 18–68; 14 males) with varying AP ability completed a standard AP task and the explicit priming AP task. Results showed: 1) phenotypic variability of AP ability, including high-accuracy AP, heterogeneous intermediate performers, and chance-level performers; 2) intermediate performance profiles that were either reliant on or independent of relative pitch strategies, as identified by the priming task; and 3) the emergence of a bimodal distribution of AP performance when adopting scoring criteria that assign credit to semitone errors. These findings show the importance of methods in studying behavioural traits, and are a key step towards identifying AP phenotypes. Replication of our results in larger samples will further establish the usefulness of this priming paradigm in AP research.

Auditory temporal resolution and backward masking in musicians with absolute pitch

“…In line with this argumentation is a neuroimaging study of gap detection tasks (Vaden et al, 2020) that reported a lack of activation of brain regions belonging to the ventral stream, such as the planum polare (Kim and Knösche, 2017b). However, considering that gap detection was able to predict pitch identification in the regression analyzes and that the approach to AP as a continuum trait is more suitable for the scoring method used in this investigation (Germano et al, 2021;Bairnsfather et al, 2022b), these results are most likely due to the inability of the arbitrary criteria used for the group assignment to generate clearly distinct groups. Aware of such limitation, we conducted correlation and regression analyzes between the measures of pitch identification and GIN tests, showing that gap detection explained a high amount of the variance (between 20 and 36%, considering the values of adjusted R 2 for the uncontrolled models) present in our sample's pitch identification ability.…”

“…In line with this argumentation is a neuroimaging study of gap detection tasks ( Vaden et al, 2020 ) that reported a lack of activation of brain regions belonging to the ventral stream, such as the planum polare ( Kim and Knösche, 2017b ). However, considering that gap detection was able to predict pitch identification in the regression analyzes and that the approach to AP as a continuum trait is more suitable for the scoring method used in this investigation ( Germano et al, 2021 ; Bairnsfather et al, 2022b ), these results are most likely due to the inability of the arbitrary criteria used for the group assignment to generate clearly distinct groups.…”

“…Researchers proposing that AP is an all-or-none ability have used different cut-off points in different parameters of pitch identification tasks, such as hit rate, reaction time, deviation from the original note, and the number of timbres tested. This results in pronounced methodological heterogeneity and difficulty comparing studies ( Sergeant and Vraka, 2014 ; Germano et al, 2016 ; Bairnsfather et al, 2022b ). Others reject that notion and place AP in the “continuum feature” category ( Schellenberg and Trehub, 2003 ; Vitouch, 2003 ; Gußmack et al, 2006 ; Chavarria-Soley, 2016 ; Leite et al, 2016 ; Jakubowski et al, 2017 ).…”