Faster decline of pitch memory over time in congenital amusia

• Authors: Victoria J. Williamson , Claire McDonald , Diana Deutsch , Timothy D. Griffiths , Lauren Stewart

Abstracts

EN

Congenital amusia (amusia, hereafter) is a developmental disorder that impacts negatively on the perception of music. Psychophysical testing suggests that individuals with amusia have above average thresholds for detection of pitch change and pitch direction discrimination; however, a low-level auditory perceptual problem cannot completely explain the disorder, since discrimination of melodies is also impaired when the constituent intervals are suprathreshold for perception. The aim of the present study was to test pitch memory as a function of (a) time and (b) tonal interference, in order to determine whether pitch traces are inherently weaker in amusic individuals. Memory for the pitch of single tones was compared using two versions of a paradigm developed by Deutsch (1970a). In both tasks, participants compared the pitch of a standard (S) versus a comparison (C) tone. In the time task, the S and C tones were presented, separated in time by 0, 1, 5, 10, and 15 s (blocked presentation). In the interference task, the S and C tones were presented with a fixed time interval (5 s) but with a variable number of irrelevant tones in between: 0, 2, 4, 6, and 8 tones (blocked presentation). In the time task, control performance remained high for all time in tervals, but amusics showed a performance decrement over time. In the interference task, controls and amusics showed a similar performance decrement with increasing number of irrelevant tones. Overall, the results suggest that the pitch representations of amusic individuals are less stable and more prone to decay than those of matched non-amusic individuals.

Keywords

EN

congenital amusia; short-term memory; delay; tonal interference

• Publisher: Wyższa Szkoła Finansów i Zarządzania w Warszawie
• Journal: Advances in Cognitive Psychology
• Year: 2010
• Volume: 6
• Pages: 15-22

Contributors

author

Victoria J. Williamson

• Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

author

Claire McDonald

• Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

author

Diana Deutsch

• Department of Psychology, University of California, La Jolla, CA, USA

author

Timothy D. Griffiths

• Institute of Neuroscience, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

author

Lauren Stewart

• Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

References

• Ayotte, J., Peretz, I., & Hyde, K. (2002). Congenital amusia: A group study of adults afflicted with a music-specific disorder.Brain, 125, 238-251.
• Bishop, D. V. M. (2007). Using mismatch negativity to study central auditory processing in developmental language and literacy impairments: Where are we, and where should we be going?Psychological Bulletin, 133, 651-672.
• Clement, S., Demany, L., & Semal, C. (1999). Memory for pitch versus memory for loudness.Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 106, 2805-2811.
• Cuddy, L. L., Balkwill, L.-L., Peretz, I., Holden, R. R., Avanzini, G., Lopez, L., et al. (2005). Musical difficulties are rare: A study of "tone deafness" among university students. In G. Avanzini, L. Lopez, S. Koelsch, & M. Manjno (Eds.),The neurosciences and music II: From perception to performance(pp. 311-324). New York, NY: New York Academy of Sciences.
• Deutsch, D. (1970a). Tones and numbers: Specificity of interference in immediate memory.Science, 168, 1604-1605.
• Deutsch, D. (1970b).The deterioration of pitch information in memory.Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California at San Diego.
• Deutsch, D. (1973). Interference in memory between tones adjacent in the musical scale.Journal of Experimental Psychology, 100, 228-231.
• Deutsch, D. (1978). Delayed pitch comparisons and the principle of proximity.Perception & Psychophysics, 23, 227-230.
• Elliot, L. L. (1970). Pitch memory for short tones.Perception & Psychophysics, 8, 379-384.
• Foxton, J. M., Dean, J. L., Gee, R., Peretz, I., & Griffiths, T. D. (2004). Characterization of deficits in pitch perception underlying "tone deafness".Brain, 127, 801-810.
• Gosselin, N., Jolicoeur, P., & Peretz, I. (2009). Impaired memory for pitch in congenital amusia.The Neurosciences and Music III. Disorders and Plasticity. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1169, 270-272.
• Green, D. M., & Swets, J. A. (1966).Signal detection theory and psychophysics.New York: John Wiley and Sons.
• Harris, J. D. (1952). The decline of pitch discrimination with time.Journal of Experimental Psychology, 43, 96-99.
• Hyde, K., & Peretz, I. (2004). Brains that are out of tune but in time.Psychological Science, 15, 356-360.
• Jones, J., Zalewski, C., Brewer, C., Lucker, J., & Drayna, D. (2009). Widespread auditory deficits in tune deafness.Ear and Hearing, 30, 63-72.
• Kalmus, H., & Fry, D. B. (1980). On tune deafness (dysmelodia): Frequency, development, genetics, and musical background.Annals of Human Genetics, 43, 369-382.
• Lewandowsky, S., Oberauer, K., & Brown, G. D. A (2009). No temporal decay in verbal short-term memory.Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13, 120-126.
• Massaro, D. W. (1970). Retroactive interference in short-term recognition memory for pitch.Journal of Experimental Psychology, 83, 32-39.
• Peretz, I., Brattico, E., Jarvenpaa, M., & Tervaniemi, M. (2009). The amusic brain: In tune, out of key, and unaware.Brain, 132, 1277-1286.
• Peretz, I., Champod, A.-S., & Hyde, K. L. (2003). Varieties of musical disorders. The Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 999, 58-75.
• Peretz, I., Ayotte, J., Zatorre, R. J., Mehler, J., Ahad, P., Penhune, V. B., & Jutras, B. (2002). Congenital amusia: A disorder of fine-grained pitch discrimination.Neuron, 33, 185-191.
• Sloboda, J. A., Wise, K. J., Peretz, I., Avanzini, G., Lopez, L., Koelsch, S., et al. (2005). Quantifying tone deafness in the general population. In G. Avanzini, L. Lopez, S. Koelsch, & M. Manjno (Eds.),The neurosciences and music II: From perception to performance(pp. 255-261). New York, NY: New York Academy of Sciences.
• Tillmann, B., Schulze, K., & Foxton, J. M. (2009). Congenital amusia: A short-term memory deficit for nonverbal, but not verbal sounds.Brain and Cognition, 71, 259-264.
• Trehub, S. E., & Hannon, E. E. (2006). Infant music perception: Domain-general or domain-specific mechanisms.Cognition, 100, 73-99.
• Wise, K. J., & Sloboda, J. A. (2008). Establishing an empirical profile of self-defined "tone deafness": Perception, singing performance, and self-assessment.Musicae Scientiae, 12, 3-26.

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10053-008-0073-5