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Amusia is associated with deficits in spatial processing

Abstract

Amusia (commonly referred to as tone-deafness) is a difficulty in discriminating pitch changes in melodies that affects around 4% of the human population. Amusia cannot be explained as a simple sensory impairment. Here we show that amusia is strongly related to a deficit in spatial processing in adults. Compared to two matched control groups (musicians and non-musicians), participants in the amusic group were significantly impaired on a visually presented mental rotation task. Amusic subjects were also less prone to interference in a spatial stimulus-response incompatibility task and performed significantly faster than controls in an interference task in which they were required to make simple pitch discriminations while concurrently performing a mental rotation task. This indicates that the processing of pitch in music normally depends on the cognitive mechanisms that are used to process spatial representations in other modalities.

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Figure 1: Distribution of scores on the contour-violated subtest of the MBEA across all right-handed subjects.
Figure 2: Errors made during the mental rotation and animal matching control task.
Figure 3
Figure 4: Performance during the SRC pitch discrimination task for the compatible and incompatible response configurations.
Figure 5: Increase in reaction time on the pitch discrimination task compared to baseline when this task was performed concurrently with other tasks.
Figure 6: Changes in performance speed on animal matching and mental rotation tasks when performed concurrently with pitch discrimination.
Figure 7: Changes in error rate on animal matching and mental rotation tasks when performed concurrently with pitch discrimination.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to L. Franz and R. O'Shea for useful comments on the manuscript and the procedure.

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Correspondence to David K Bilkey.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Fig. 1

The relationship between scores on the MBEA subtest and errors on the mental rotation task, with the data from two left-handed amusic subjects marked with asterisks. (PDF 78 kb)

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Douglas, K., Bilkey, D. Amusia is associated with deficits in spatial processing. Nat Neurosci 10, 915–921 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1925

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