Dataset Information

Tune deafness: processing melodic errors outside of conscious awareness as reflected by components of the auditory ERP.

ABSTRACT: Tune deafness (TD) is a central auditory processing disorder characterized by the inability to discriminate pitch, reproduce melodies or to recognize deviations in melodic structure, in spite of normal hearing. The cause of the disorder is unknown. To identify a pathophysiological marker, we ascertained a group of severely affected TD patients using the Distorted Tunes Test, an ecologically valid task with a longstanding history, and used electrophysiological methods to characterize the brain's responses to correct and incorrect melodic sequences. As expected, we identified a neural correlate of patients' unawareness of melodic distortions: deviant notes modulated long-latency auditory evoked potentials and elicited a mismatch negativity in controls but not in affected subjects. However a robust P300 was elicited by deviant notes, suggesting that, as in blindsight, TD subjects process stimuli that they cannot consciously perceive. Given the high heritability of TD, these patients may make it possible to use genetic methods to study cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying conscious awareness.

SUBMITTER: Braun A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2396485 | biostudies-literature | 2008 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Tune deafness: processing melodic errors outside of conscious awareness as reflected by components of the auditory ERP.

Braun Allen A McArdle Joe J Jones Jennifer J Nechaev Vladimir V Zalewski Christopher C Brewer Carmen C Drayna Dennis D

PloS one 20080611 6

Tune deafness (TD) is a central auditory processing disorder characterized by the inability to discriminate pitch, reproduce melodies or to recognize deviations in melodic structure, in spite of normal hearing. The cause of the disorder is unknown. To identify a pathophysiological marker, we ascertained a group of severely affected TD patients using the Distorted Tunes Test, an ecologically valid task with a longstanding history, and used electrophysiological methods to characterize the brain's ...[more]

PMID: 18545651

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Project description:Previous studies have shown that complex visual stimuli, such as emotional facial expressions, can influence brain activity independently of the observers' awareness. Little is known yet, however, about the "informational correlates" of consciousness - i.e., which low-level information correlates with brain activation during conscious vs. non-conscious perception. Here, we investigated this question in the spatial frequency (SF) domain. We examined which SFs in disgusted and fearful faces modulate activation in the insula and amygdala over time and as a function of awareness, using a combination of intracranial event-related potentials (ERPs), SF Bubbles (Willenbockel et al., 2010a), and Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS; Tsuchiya and Koch, 2005). Patients implanted with electrodes for epilepsy monitoring viewed face photographs (13°?×?7°) that were randomly SF filtered on a trial-by-trial basis. In the conscious condition, the faces were visible; in the non-conscious condition, they were rendered invisible using CFS. The data were analyzed by performing multiple linear regressions on the SF filters from each trial and the transformed ERP amplitudes across time. The resulting classification images suggest that many SFs are involved in the conscious and non-conscious perception of emotional expressions, with SFs between 6 and 10 cycles per face width being particularly important early on. The results also revealed qualitative differences between the awareness conditions for both regions. Non-conscious processing relied on low SFs more and was faster than conscious processing. Overall, our findings are consistent with the idea that different pathways are employed for the processing of emotional stimuli under different degrees of awareness. The present study represents a first step to mapping how SF information "flows" through the emotion-processing network with a high temporal resolution and to shedding light on the informational correlates of consciousness in general.

Project description:Background. Auditory Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) are useful for understanding early auditory development among infants, as it allows the collection of a relatively large amount of data in a short time. So far, studies that have investigated development in auditory ERPs in infancy have mainly used single sounds as stimuli. Yet in real life, infants must decode successive rather than single acoustic events. In the present study, we tested 4-, 8-, and 12-month-old infants' auditory ERPs to musical melodies comprising three piano notes, and examined ERPs to each individual note in the melody. Methods. Infants were presented with 360 repetitions of a three-note melody while EEG was recorded from 128 channels on the scalp through a Geodesic Sensor Net. For each infant, both latency and amplitude of auditory components P1 and N2 were measured from averaged ERPs for each individual note. Results. Analysis was restricted to response collected at frontal central site. For all three notes, there was an overall reduction in latency for both P1 and N2 over age. For P1, latency reduction was significant from 4 to 8 months, but not from 8 to 12 months. N2 latency, on the other hand, decreased significantly from 4 to 8 to 12 months. With regard to amplitude, no significant change was found for either P1 or N2. Nevertheless, the waveforms of the three age groups were qualitatively different: for the 4-month-olds, the P1-N2 deflection was attenuated for the second and the third notes; for the 8-month-olds, such attenuation was observed only for the middle note; for the 12-month-olds, the P1 and N2 peaks show relatively equivalent amplitude and peak width across all three notes. Conclusion. Our findings indicate that the infant brain is able to register successive acoustic events in a stream, and ERPs become better time-locked to each composite event over age. Younger infants may have difficulties in responding to late occurring events in a stream, and the onset response to the late events may overlap with the incomplete response to preceding events.

Dataset Information

Tune deafness: processing melodic errors outside of conscious awareness as reflected by components of the auditory ERP.

Publications

Tune deafness: processing melodic errors outside of conscious awareness as reflected by components of the auditory ERP.

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