Dataset Information

Basic timekeeping deficit in the Beat-based Form of Congenital Amusia.

ABSTRACT: Humans have the capacity to match movements' timing with the beat of music. Yet some individuals show marked difficulties. The causes of these difficulties remain to be determined. Here, we investigate to what extend a beat synchronization deficit can be traced to basic timekeeping abilities. Eight beat-impaired individuals who were unable to successfully synchronize to the beat of music were compared to matched controls in their ability to tap a self-paced regular beat, to tap to a metronome spanning a large range of tempi (225-1709?ms inter-tone onsets), and to maintain the tempi after the sounds had ceased. Whether paced by a metronome or not, beat-impaired individuals showed poorer regularity (higher variability) in tapping, with an inability to synchronize at a fast tempo (225?ms between beats) or to sustain tapping at slow tempi (above 1?sec). Yet, they showed evidence of predictive and flexible processing. We suggest that the beat impairment is due to imprecise internal timekeeping mechanism.

SUBMITTER: Tranchant P

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7239916 | biostudies-literature | 2020 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Basic timekeeping deficit in the Beat-based Form of Congenital Amusia.

Tranchant Pauline P Peretz Isabelle I

Scientific reports 20200520 1

Humans have the capacity to match movements' timing with the beat of music. Yet some individuals show marked difficulties. The causes of these difficulties remain to be determined. Here, we investigate to what extend a beat synchronization deficit can be traced to basic timekeeping abilities. Eight beat-impaired individuals who were unable to successfully synchronize to the beat of music were compared to matched controls in their ability to tap a self-paced regular beat, to tap to a metronome sp ...[more]

PMID: 32433522

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Project description:Congenital amusia is currently thought to be a life-long neurogenetic disorder in music perception, impervious to training in pitch or melody discrimination. This study provides an explicit test of whether amusic deficits can be reduced with training. Twenty amusics and 20 matched controls participated in four sessions of psychophysical training involving either pure-tone (500 Hz) pitch discrimination or a control task of lateralization (interaural level differences for bandpass white noise). Pure-tone pitch discrimination at low, medium, and high frequencies (500, 2000, and 8000 Hz) was measured before and after training (pretest and posttest) to determine the specificity of learning. Melody discrimination was also assessed before and after training using the full Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia, the most widely used standardized test to diagnose amusia. Amusics performed more poorly than controls in pitch but not localization discrimination, but both groups improved with practice on the trained stimuli. Learning was broad, occurring across all three frequencies and melody discrimination for all groups, including those who trained on the non-pitch control task. Following training, 11 of 20 amusics no longer met the global diagnostic criteria for amusia. A separate group of untrained controls (n = 20), who also completed melody discrimination and pretest, improved by an equal amount as trained controls on all measures, suggesting that the bulk of learning for the control group occurred very rapidly from the pretest. Thirty-one trained participants (13 amusics) returned one year later to assess long-term maintenance of pitch and melody discrimination. On average, there was no change in performance between posttest and one-year follow-up, demonstrating that improvements on pitch- and melody-related tasks in amusics and controls can be maintained. The findings indicate that amusia is not always a life-long deficit when using the current standard diagnostic criteria.

Project description:While the issue of individual variation has been widely studied in second language learning or processing, it is less well understood how perceptual and musical aptitude differences can explain individual variation in native speech processing. In the current study, we make use of tone merger in Hong Kong Cantonese, an ongoing sound change that concerns the merging of tones in perception, production or both in a portion of native speakers, to examine the possible relationship between tone merger and musical and pitch abilities. Although a previous study has reported the occurrence of tone merger independently of musical training, it has not been investigated before whether tone-merging individuals, especially those merging tones in perception, would have inferior musical perception and fine-grained pitch sensitivities, given the close relationship of speech and music. To this end, we tested three groups of tone-merging individuals with various tone perception and production profiles on musical perception and pitch threshold tasks, in comparison to a group of Cantonese speakers with congenital amusia, and another group of controls without tone merger or amusia. Additionally, the amusics were compared with tone-merging individuals on the details of their tone discrimination and production profiles. The results showed a clear dissociation of tone merger and amusia, with the tone-merging individuals exhibiting intact musical and pitch abilities; on the other hand, the amusics demonstrated widespread difficulties in tone discrimination yet intact tone production, in contrast to the highly selective confusion of a specific tone pair in production or discrimination in tone-merging individuals. These findings provide the first evidence that tone merger and amusia are distinct from each other, and further suggest that the cause of tone merger may lie elsewhere rather than being driven by musical or pitch deficits. We also discussed issues arising from the current findings regarding the neural mechanisms of tone merger and amusia.

Dataset Information

Basic timekeeping deficit in the Beat-based Form of Congenital Amusia.

Publications

Basic timekeeping deficit in the Beat-based Form of Congenital Amusia.

Similar Datasets

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