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Isabelle Peretz - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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influence of background musical emotions on attention in congenital Amusia
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2021Co-Authors: Natalia B Fernandez, Nathalie Gosselin, Patrik Vuilleumier, Isabelle PeretzAbstract:Congenital Amusia in its most common form is a disorder characterized by a musical pitch processing deficit. Although pitch is involved in conveying emotion in music, the implications for pitch deficits on musical emotion judgements is still under debate. Relatedly, both limited and spared musical emotion recognition was reported in Amusia in conditions where emotion cues were not determined by musical mode or dissonance. Additionally, assumed links between musical abilities and visuo-spatial attention processes need further investigation in congenital amusics. Hence, we here test to what extent musical emotions can influence attentional performance. Fifteen congenital amusic adults and fifteen healthy controls matched for age and education were assessed in three attentional conditions: executive control (distractor inhibition), alerting, and orienting (spatial shift) while music expressing either joy, tenderness, sadness, or tension was presented. Visual target detection was in the normal range for both accuracy and response times in the amusic relative to the control participants. Moreover, in both groups, music exposure produced facilitating effects on selective attention that appeared to be driven by the arousal dimension of musical emotional content, with faster correct target detection during joyful compared to sad music. These findings corroborate the idea that pitch processing deficits related to congenital Amusia do not impede other cognitive domains, particularly visual attention. Furthermore, our study uncovers an intact influence of music and its emotional content on the attentional abilities of amusic individuals. The results highlight the domain-selectivity of the pitch disorder in congenital Amusia, which largely spares the development of visual attention and affective systems.
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ability to process musical pitch is unrelated to the memory advantage for vocal music
Brain and Cognition, 2019Co-Authors: Michael W Weiss, Isabelle PeretzAbstract:Listeners remember vocal melodies better than instrumental melodies, but the origins of the effect are unclear. One explanation for the 'voice advantage' is that general perceptual mechanisms enhance processing of conspecific signals. An alternative possibility is that the voice, by virtue of its expressiveness in pitch, simply provides more musical information to the listener. Individuals with congenital Amusia provide a unique opportunity to disentangle the effects of conspecific status and vocal expressiveness because they cannot readily process subtleties in musical pitch. Forty-one participants whose musical pitch discrimination ability ranged from congenitally amusic to typical were tested. Participants heard vocal and instrumental melodies during an exposure phase, and heard the same melodies intermixed with timbre-matched foils in a recognition phase. Memory was better for vocal than instrumental melodies, but the magnitude of the advantage was unrelated to musical pitch discrimination or memory overall. The voice enhances melodic memory regardless of music perception ability, ruling out the role of pitch expressiveness in the voice advantage. More importantly, listeners across a wide range of musical ability can benefit from the privileged status of the voice.
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Prevalence of congenital Amusia
European Journal of Human Genetics, 2017Co-Authors: Isabelle Peretz, Dominique T VuvanAbstract:Congenital Amusia (commonly known as tone deafness) is a lifelong musical disorder that affects 4% of the population according to a single estimate based on a single test from 1980. Here we present the first large-based measure of prevalence with a sample of 20 000 participants, which does not rely on self-referral. On the basis of three objective tests and a questionnaire, we show that (a) the prevalence of congenital Amusia is only 1.5%, with slightly more females than males, unlike other developmental disorders where males often predominate; (b) self-disclosure is a reliable index of congenital Amusia, which suggests that congenital Amusia is hereditary, with 46% first-degree relatives similarly affected; (c) the deficit is not attenuated by musical training and (d) it emerges in relative isolation from other cognitive disorder, except for spatial orientation problems. Hence, we suggest that congenital Amusia is likely to result from genetic variations that affect musical abilities specifically.
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effects of vocal training in a musicophile with congenital Amusia
Neurocase, 2016Co-Authors: Jonathan M P Wilbiks, Isabelle Peretz, Dominique T Vuvan, Pieryves Girard, Frank A RussoAbstract:ABSTRACTCongenital Amusia is a condition in which an individual suffers from a deficit of musical pitch perception and production. Individuals suffering from congenital Amusia generally tend to abstain from musical activities. Here, we present the unique case of Tim Falconer, a self-described musicophile who also suffers from congenital Amusia. We describe and assess Tim’s attempts to train himself out of Amusia through a self-imposed 18-month program of formal vocal training and practice. We tested Tim with respect to music perception and vocal production across seven sessions including pre- and post-training assessments. We also obtained diffusion-weighted images of his brain to assess connectivity between auditory and motor planning areas via the arcuate fasciculus (AF). Tim’s behavioral and brain data were compared to that of normal and amusic controls. While Tim showed temporary gains in his singing ability, he did not reach normal levels, and these gains faded when he was not engaged in regular less...
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meta analytic evidence for the non modularity of pitch processing in congenital Amusia
Cortex, 2015Co-Authors: Dominique T Vuvan, Marilia Nunessilva, Isabelle PeretzAbstract:A major theme driving research in congenital Amusia is related to the modularity of this musical disorder, with two possible sources of the amusic pitch perception deficit. The first possibility is that the amusic deficit is due to a broad disorder of acoustic pitch processing that has the effect of disrupting downstream musical pitch processing, and the second is that Amusia is specific to a musical pitch processing module. To interrogate these hypotheses, we performed a meta-analysis on two types of effect sizes contained within 42 studies in the Amusia literature: the performance gap between amusics and controls on tasks of pitch discrimination, broadly defined, and the correlation between specifically acoustic pitch perception and musical pitch perception. To augment the correlation database, we also calculated this correlation using data from 106 participants tested by our own research group. We found strong evidence for the acoustic account of Amusia. The magnitude of the performance gap was moderated by the size of pitch change, but not by whether the stimuli were composed of tones or speech. Furthermore, there was a significant correlation between an individual's acoustic and musical pitch perception. However, individual cases show a double dissociation between acoustic and musical processing, which suggests that although most amusic cases are probably explainable by an acoustic deficit, there is heterogeneity within the disorder. Finally, we found that tonal language fluency does not influence the performance gap between amusics and controls, and that there was no evidence that amusics fare worse with pitch direction tasks than pitch discrimination tasks. These results constitute a quantitative review of the current literature of congenital Amusia, and suggest several new directions for research, including the experimental induction of amusic behaviour through transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and the systematic exploration of the developmental trajectory of this disorder.
Barbara Tillmann - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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consonance perception in congenital Amusia behavioral and brain responses to harmonicity and beating cues
bioRxiv, 2021Co-Authors: Andrew J Oxenham, Barbara Tillmann, Lesly Fornoni, Jackson Graves, Agathe Pralus, Anne CaclinAbstract:Congenital Amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by difficulties in the perception and production of music, including the perception of consonance and dissonance, or the judgment of certain combinations of pitches as more pleasant than others. Two perceptual cues for dissonance are inharmonicity (the lack of a common fundamental frequency between components) and beating (amplitude fluctuations produced by close, interacting frequency components). In the presence of inharmonicities or beats, amusics have previously been reported to be insensitive to inharmonicity, but to exhibit normal sensitivity to beats. In the present study, we measured adaptive discrimination thresholds in amusic participants and found elevated thresholds for both cues. We recorded EEG and measured the mismatch negativity (MMN) in evoked potentials to consonance and dissonance deviants in an oddball paradigm. The amplitude of the MMN response was similar overall for amusics and controls, but while control participants showed a stronger MMN to harmonicity cues than to beating cues, amusic participants showed a stronger MMN to beating cues than to harmonicity cues. These findings suggest that initial encoding of consonance cues may be intact in Amusia despite impaired behavioral performance, but that the relative weight of non-spectral cues may be increased for amusic individuals.
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pre attentive processing of neutral and emotional sounds in congenital Amusia
bioRxiv, 2020Co-Authors: Agathe Pralus, Barbara Tillmann, Lesly Fornoni, Jackson Graves, Marie Gomot, Fanny Cholvy, Anne CaclinAbstract:Abstract Congenital Amusia is a life-long deficit of musical processing. This deficit can extend to the processing of language and in particular, emotional prosody. In a previous behavioral study, we revealed that while amusic individuals had difficulties in explicitly recognizing emotions for short vowels, they rated the emotional intensity of these same vowels as did their matched control participants. This finding led to the hypothesis that congenital amusics might be impaired for explicit emotional prosody recognition, but not for its implicit processing. With the aim to investigate amusics’ automatic processing of prosody, the present study measured electroencephalography (EEG) when participants listened passively to vowels presented within an oddball paradigm. Emotionally neutral vowel served as the standard and either emotional (anger and sadness) or neutral vowels as deviants. Evoked potentials were compared between participants with congenital Amusia and control participants matched in age, education, and musical training. The MMN was rather preserved for all deviants in Amusia, whereas an earlier negative component was found decreased in amplitude in amusics compared to controls for the neutral and sadness deviants. For the most salient deviant (anger), the P3a was decreased in amplitude for amusics compared to controls. These results showed some preserved automatic detection of emotional deviance in Amusia despite an early deficit to process subtle acoustic changes. In addition, the automatic attentional shift in response to salient deviants at later processing stages was reduced in amusics in comparison to the controls. In the three ERPs related to the deviance, between-group differences were larger over bilateral prefrontal areas, previously shown to display functional impairments in congenital Amusia. Our present study thus provides further understanding of the dichotomy between implicit and explicit processing in congenital Amusia, in particular for vocal stimuli with emotional content.
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listeners with congenital Amusia are sensitive to context uncertainty in melodic sequences
bioRxiv, 2020Co-Authors: D R Quirogamartinez, Barbara Tillmann, Lesly Fornoni, Fanny Cholvy, Elvira Brattico, Peter Vuust, Anne CaclinAbstract:In typical listeners, the perceptual salience of a surprising auditory event depends on the uncertainty of its context. For example, in melodies, pitch deviants are more easily detected and generate larger neural responses when the context is highly predictable than when it is less so. However, it is not known whether amusic listeners with abnormal pitch processing are sensitive to the degree of uncertainty of pitch sequences and, if so, whether they are to a different extent than typical listeners. To answer this question, we manipulated the uncertainty of short melodies while participants with and without congenital Amusia underwent EEG recordings in a passive listening task. Uncertainty was manipulated by presenting melodies with different levels of complexity and familiarity, under the assumption that simpler and more familiar patterns would enhance pitch predictability. We recorded mismatch negativity (MMN) responses to pitch, intensity, timbre, location, and rhythm deviants as a measure of auditory surprise. We found reduced MMN amplitudes and longer peak latencies for all sound features with increasing levels of complexity, and putative familiarity effects only for intensity deviants. No significant group-by-complexity or group-by-familiarity interactions were detected. However, in amusics, pitch MMN responses peaked later and were disrupted in high complexity and unfamiliar melodies. Our results indicate that amusics are sensitive to the uncertainty of melodic sequences and hint at pitch-specific impairments in this population when uncertainty is high. As previous research has linked Amusia with abnormal frontotemporal connectivity, our findings potentially suggest that processing pitch under high uncertainty conditions requires an intact frontotemporal loop.
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short and long term memory for pitch and non pitch contours insights from congenital Amusia
Brain and Cognition, 2019Co-Authors: Andrew J Oxenham, Lesly Fornoni, Anne Caclin, Jackson Graves, Agathe Pralus, Barbara TillmannAbstract:Congenital Amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in music perception, including discriminating and remembering melodies and melodic contours. As non-amusic listeners can perceive contours in dimensions other than pitch, such as loudness and brightness, our present study investigated whether amusics' pitch contour deficits also extend to these other auditory dimensions. Amusic and control participants performed an identification task for ten familiar melodies and a short-term memory task requiring the discrimination of changes in the contour of novel four-tone melodies. For both tasks, melodic contour was defined by pitch, brightness, or loudness. Amusic participants showed some ability to extract contours in all three dimensions. For familiar melodies, amusic participants showed impairment in all conditions, perhaps reflecting the fact that the long-term memory representations of the familiar melodies were defined in pitch. In the contour discrimination task with novel melodies, amusic participants exhibited less impairment for loudness-based melodies than for pitch- or brightness-based melodies, suggesting some specificity of the deficit for spectral changes, if not for pitch alone. The results suggest pitch and brightness may not be processed by the same mechanisms as loudness, and that short-term memory for loudness contours may be spared to some degree in congenital Amusia.
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emotional prosody in congenital Amusia impaired and spared processes
Neuropsychologia, 2019Co-Authors: Agathe Pralus, Barbara Tillmann, Lesly Fornoni, Romain Bouet, Marie Gomot, Anjali Bhatara, Anne CaclinAbstract:Congenital Amusia is a lifelong deficit of music processing, in particular of pitch processing. Most research investigating this neurodevelopmental disorder has focused on music perception, but pitch also has a critical role for intentional and emotional prosody in speech. Two previous studies investigating amusics' emotional prosody recognition have shown either some deficit or no deficit (compared to controls). However, these previous studies have used only long sentence stimuli, which allow for limited control over acoustic content. Here, we tested amusic individuals for emotional prosody perception in sentences and vowels. For each type of material, participants performed an emotion categorization task, followed by intensity ratings of the recognized emotion. Compared to controls, amusic individuals had similar recognition of emotion in sentences, but poorer performance in vowels, especially when distinguishing sad and neutral stimuli. These lower performances in amusics were linked with difficulties in processing pitch and spectro-temporal parameters of the vowel stimuli. For emotion intensity, neither sentence nor vowel ratings differed between participant groups, suggesting preserved implicit processing of emotional prosody in Amusia. These findings can be integrated into previous data showing preserved implicit processing of pitch and emotion in Amusia alongside deficits in explicit recognition tasks. They are thus further supporting the hypothesis of impaired conscious analysis of pitch and timbre in this neurodevelopmental disorder.
Lauren Stewart - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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reduced functional connectivity between left frontal and right auditory cortices during speech perception in congenital Amusia
bioRxiv, 2019Co-Authors: Lauren Stewart, Kyle Jasmin, Fred Dick, Adam TierneyAbstract:Abstract Congenital Amusia is a condition characterized by disordered perception of and memory for pitch. Investigations of Amusia’s neural basis have typically used musical or tonal tasks to demonstrate reduced connectivity between frontal and auditory cortices within the right hemisphere. However, pitch is not only a musical property, but is also an important aspect of spoken language — one which amusics, presumably because of their impairment, tend to rely on less than non-amusic adults. It is an open question whether amusics’ decreased reliance on pitch for speech shares the same right hemispheric neural substrate as their music-related deficits. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan 15 individuals with Amusia and 15 non-amusic controls while they performed a speech categorization task (intonational phrase boundary detection). On each trial, participants matched auditory and visual sentences by relying on pitch cues, duration cues, or both combined. We used a data-driven analysis to identify the strongest functional connectivity differences between the amusics and controls. Group differences in global functional connectivity (Control > Amusia) were strongest in four regions in lateral prefrontal cortex. Connectivity with these ‘seed’ regions was examined with respect to the rest of the brain. Participants with Amusia showed prominent decreases in functional connectivity between language-related regions (left inferior and middle frontal gyrus/DLPFC) and pitch-related regions (right auditory and anterior insular cortex). No connectivity differences between the cue conditions were detected and no condition-by-group interactions were found, suggesting that decreased functional connectivity in Amusia persisted irrespective of which acoustic cues judgments were based on. There were also no group differences in degree of task-related activation. We conclude that functional connectivity between left—as well as right—frontal cortex and pitch-related right hemisphere regions is decreased in Amusia, and suggest this decreased connectivity may reflect amusics’ strategic downweighting of pitch information during processing of spoken language. Our results also suggest that individual differences in auditory abilities relating to specific dimensions (such as pitch) are reflected in differential functional connectivity between regions that process those dimensions.
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Impaired socio-emotional processing in a developmental music disorder
Scientific Reports, 2016Co-Authors: César F. Lima, Jason D Warren, Daniel Mullensiefen, Olivia Brancatisano, Amy Fancourt, Sophie K. Scott, Lauren StewartAbstract:Some individuals show a congenital deficit for music processing despite normal peripheral auditory processing, cognitive functioning, and music exposure. This condition, termed congenital Amusia, is typically approached regarding its profile of musical and pitch difficulties. Here, we examine whether Amusia also affects socio-emotional processing, probing auditory and visual domains. Thirteen adults with Amusia and 11 controls completed two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants judged emotions in emotional speech prosody, nonverbal vocalizations (e.g., crying), and (silent) facial expressions. Target emotions were: amusement, anger, disgust, fear, pleasure, relief, and sadness. Compared to controls, amusics were impaired for all stimulus types, and the magnitude of their impairment was similar for auditory and visual emotions. In Experiment 2, participants listened to spontaneous and posed laughs, and either inferred the authenticity of the speaker’s state, or judged how much laughs were contagious. Amusics showed decreased sensitivity to laughter authenticity, but normal contagion responses. Across the experiments, mixed-effects models revealed that the acoustic features of vocal signals predicted socio-emotional evaluations in both groups, but the profile of predictive acoustic features was different in Amusia. These findings suggest that a developmental music disorder can affect socio-emotional cognition in subtle ways, an impairment not restricted to auditory information.
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affective evaluation of simultaneous tone combinations in congenital Amusia
Neuropsychologia, 2015Co-Authors: Manuela M Marin, William Forde Thompson, Lauren Stewart, Bruno GingrasAbstract:Congenital Amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by impaired pitch processing. Although pitch simultaneities are among the fundamental building blocks of Western tonal music, affective responses to simultaneities such as isolated dyads varying in consonance/dissonance or chords varying in major/minor quality have rarely been studied in amusic individuals. Thirteen amusics and thirteen matched controls enculturated to Western tonal music provided pleasantness ratings of sine-tone dyads and complex-tone dyads in piano timbre as well as perceived happiness/sadness ratings of sine-tone triads and complex-tone triads in piano timbre. Acoustical analyses of roughness and harmonicity were conducted to determine whether similar acoustic information contributed to these evaluations in amusics and controls. Amusic individuals' pleasantness ratings indicated sensitivity to consonance and dissonance for complex-tone (piano timbre) dyads and, to a lesser degree, sine-tone dyads, whereas controls showed sensitivity when listening to both tone types. Furthermore, amusic individuals showed some sensitivity to the happiness-major association in the complex-tone condition, but not in the sine-tone condition. Controls rated major chords as happier than minor chords in both tone types. Linear regression analyses revealed that affective ratings of dyads and triads by amusic individuals were predicted by roughness but not harmonicity, whereas affective ratings by controls were predicted by both roughness and harmonicity. We discuss affective sensitivity in congenital Amusia in view of theories of affective responses to isolated chords in Western listeners.
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detection of the arcuate fasciculus in congenital Amusia depends on the tractography algorithm
Frontiers in Psychology, 2015Co-Authors: Joyce L Chen, Timothy D Griffiths, Victoria J. Williamson, Sukhbinder Kumar, Jan Scholz, Lauren StewartAbstract:The advent of diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) allows researchers to virtually dissect white matter fiber pathways in the brain in vivo. This, for example, allows us to characterize and quantify how fiber tracts differ across populations in health and disease, and change as a function of training. Based on diffusion MRI, prior literature reports the absence of the arcuate fasciculus (AF) in some control individuals and as well in those with congenital Amusia. The complete absence of such a major anatomical tract is surprising given the subtle impairments that characterize Amusia. Thus, we hypothesize that failure to detect the AF in this population may relate to the tracking algorithm used, and is not necessarily reflective of their phenotype. Diffusion data in control and amusic individuals were analyzed using three different tracking algorithms: deterministic and probabilistic, the latter either modeling two or one fiber populations. Across the three algorithms, we replicate prior findings of a left greater than right AF volume, but do not find group differences or an interaction. We detect the AF in all individuals using the probabilistic 2-fiber model, however, tracking failed in some control and amusic individuals when deterministic tractography was applied. These findings show that the ability to detect the AF in our sample is dependent on the type of tractography algorithm. This raises the question of whether failure to detect the AF in prior studies may be unrelated to the underlying anatomy or phenotype.
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electrophysiological correlates of melodic processing in congenital Amusia
Neuropsychologia, 2013Co-Authors: Diana Omigie, Victoria J. Williamson, Marcus T Pearce, Lauren StewartAbstract:Music listening involves using previously internalized regularities to process incoming musical structures. A condition known as congenital Amusia is characterized by musical difficulties, notably in the detection of gross musical violations. However, there has been increasing evidence that individuals with the disorder show preserved musical ability when probed using implicit methods. To further characterize the degree to which amusic individuals show evidence of latent sensitivity to musical structure, particularly in the context of stimuli that are ecologically valid, electrophysiological recordings were taken from a sample of amusic and control participants as they listened to real melodies. To encourage them to pay attention to the music, participants were asked to detect occasional notes in a different timbre. Using a computational model of auditory expectation to identify points of varying levels of expectedness in these melodies (in units of information content (IC), a measure which has an inverse relationship with probability), ERP analysis investigated the extent to which the amusic brain differs from that of controls when processing notes of high IC (low probability) as compared to low IC ones (high probability). The data revealed a novel effect that was highly comparable in both groups: Notes with high IC reliably elicited a delayed P2 component relative to notes with low IC, suggesting that amusic individuals, like controls, found these notes more difficult to evaluate. However, notes with high IC were also characterized by an early frontal negativity in controls that was attenuated in amusic individuals. A correlation of this early negative effect with the ability to make accurate note expectedness judgments (previous data collected from a subset of the current sample) was shown to be present in typical individuals but compromised in individuals with Amusia: a finding in line with evidence of a close relationship between the amplitude of such a response and explicit knowledge of musical deviance.
Anne Caclin - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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consonance perception in congenital Amusia behavioral and brain responses to harmonicity and beating cues
bioRxiv, 2021Co-Authors: Andrew J Oxenham, Barbara Tillmann, Lesly Fornoni, Jackson Graves, Agathe Pralus, Anne CaclinAbstract:Congenital Amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by difficulties in the perception and production of music, including the perception of consonance and dissonance, or the judgment of certain combinations of pitches as more pleasant than others. Two perceptual cues for dissonance are inharmonicity (the lack of a common fundamental frequency between components) and beating (amplitude fluctuations produced by close, interacting frequency components). In the presence of inharmonicities or beats, amusics have previously been reported to be insensitive to inharmonicity, but to exhibit normal sensitivity to beats. In the present study, we measured adaptive discrimination thresholds in amusic participants and found elevated thresholds for both cues. We recorded EEG and measured the mismatch negativity (MMN) in evoked potentials to consonance and dissonance deviants in an oddball paradigm. The amplitude of the MMN response was similar overall for amusics and controls, but while control participants showed a stronger MMN to harmonicity cues than to beating cues, amusic participants showed a stronger MMN to beating cues than to harmonicity cues. These findings suggest that initial encoding of consonance cues may be intact in Amusia despite impaired behavioral performance, but that the relative weight of non-spectral cues may be increased for amusic individuals.
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pre attentive processing of neutral and emotional sounds in congenital Amusia
bioRxiv, 2020Co-Authors: Agathe Pralus, Barbara Tillmann, Lesly Fornoni, Jackson Graves, Marie Gomot, Fanny Cholvy, Anne CaclinAbstract:Abstract Congenital Amusia is a life-long deficit of musical processing. This deficit can extend to the processing of language and in particular, emotional prosody. In a previous behavioral study, we revealed that while amusic individuals had difficulties in explicitly recognizing emotions for short vowels, they rated the emotional intensity of these same vowels as did their matched control participants. This finding led to the hypothesis that congenital amusics might be impaired for explicit emotional prosody recognition, but not for its implicit processing. With the aim to investigate amusics’ automatic processing of prosody, the present study measured electroencephalography (EEG) when participants listened passively to vowels presented within an oddball paradigm. Emotionally neutral vowel served as the standard and either emotional (anger and sadness) or neutral vowels as deviants. Evoked potentials were compared between participants with congenital Amusia and control participants matched in age, education, and musical training. The MMN was rather preserved for all deviants in Amusia, whereas an earlier negative component was found decreased in amplitude in amusics compared to controls for the neutral and sadness deviants. For the most salient deviant (anger), the P3a was decreased in amplitude for amusics compared to controls. These results showed some preserved automatic detection of emotional deviance in Amusia despite an early deficit to process subtle acoustic changes. In addition, the automatic attentional shift in response to salient deviants at later processing stages was reduced in amusics in comparison to the controls. In the three ERPs related to the deviance, between-group differences were larger over bilateral prefrontal areas, previously shown to display functional impairments in congenital Amusia. Our present study thus provides further understanding of the dichotomy between implicit and explicit processing in congenital Amusia, in particular for vocal stimuli with emotional content.
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listeners with congenital Amusia are sensitive to context uncertainty in melodic sequences
bioRxiv, 2020Co-Authors: D R Quirogamartinez, Barbara Tillmann, Lesly Fornoni, Fanny Cholvy, Elvira Brattico, Peter Vuust, Anne CaclinAbstract:In typical listeners, the perceptual salience of a surprising auditory event depends on the uncertainty of its context. For example, in melodies, pitch deviants are more easily detected and generate larger neural responses when the context is highly predictable than when it is less so. However, it is not known whether amusic listeners with abnormal pitch processing are sensitive to the degree of uncertainty of pitch sequences and, if so, whether they are to a different extent than typical listeners. To answer this question, we manipulated the uncertainty of short melodies while participants with and without congenital Amusia underwent EEG recordings in a passive listening task. Uncertainty was manipulated by presenting melodies with different levels of complexity and familiarity, under the assumption that simpler and more familiar patterns would enhance pitch predictability. We recorded mismatch negativity (MMN) responses to pitch, intensity, timbre, location, and rhythm deviants as a measure of auditory surprise. We found reduced MMN amplitudes and longer peak latencies for all sound features with increasing levels of complexity, and putative familiarity effects only for intensity deviants. No significant group-by-complexity or group-by-familiarity interactions were detected. However, in amusics, pitch MMN responses peaked later and were disrupted in high complexity and unfamiliar melodies. Our results indicate that amusics are sensitive to the uncertainty of melodic sequences and hint at pitch-specific impairments in this population when uncertainty is high. As previous research has linked Amusia with abnormal frontotemporal connectivity, our findings potentially suggest that processing pitch under high uncertainty conditions requires an intact frontotemporal loop.
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short and long term memory for pitch and non pitch contours insights from congenital Amusia
Brain and Cognition, 2019Co-Authors: Andrew J Oxenham, Lesly Fornoni, Anne Caclin, Jackson Graves, Agathe Pralus, Barbara TillmannAbstract:Congenital Amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in music perception, including discriminating and remembering melodies and melodic contours. As non-amusic listeners can perceive contours in dimensions other than pitch, such as loudness and brightness, our present study investigated whether amusics' pitch contour deficits also extend to these other auditory dimensions. Amusic and control participants performed an identification task for ten familiar melodies and a short-term memory task requiring the discrimination of changes in the contour of novel four-tone melodies. For both tasks, melodic contour was defined by pitch, brightness, or loudness. Amusic participants showed some ability to extract contours in all three dimensions. For familiar melodies, amusic participants showed impairment in all conditions, perhaps reflecting the fact that the long-term memory representations of the familiar melodies were defined in pitch. In the contour discrimination task with novel melodies, amusic participants exhibited less impairment for loudness-based melodies than for pitch- or brightness-based melodies, suggesting some specificity of the deficit for spectral changes, if not for pitch alone. The results suggest pitch and brightness may not be processed by the same mechanisms as loudness, and that short-term memory for loudness contours may be spared to some degree in congenital Amusia.
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emotional prosody in congenital Amusia impaired and spared processes
Neuropsychologia, 2019Co-Authors: Agathe Pralus, Barbara Tillmann, Lesly Fornoni, Romain Bouet, Marie Gomot, Anjali Bhatara, Anne CaclinAbstract:Congenital Amusia is a lifelong deficit of music processing, in particular of pitch processing. Most research investigating this neurodevelopmental disorder has focused on music perception, but pitch also has a critical role for intentional and emotional prosody in speech. Two previous studies investigating amusics' emotional prosody recognition have shown either some deficit or no deficit (compared to controls). However, these previous studies have used only long sentence stimuli, which allow for limited control over acoustic content. Here, we tested amusic individuals for emotional prosody perception in sentences and vowels. For each type of material, participants performed an emotion categorization task, followed by intensity ratings of the recognized emotion. Compared to controls, amusic individuals had similar recognition of emotion in sentences, but poorer performance in vowels, especially when distinguishing sad and neutral stimuli. These lower performances in amusics were linked with difficulties in processing pitch and spectro-temporal parameters of the vowel stimuli. For emotion intensity, neither sentence nor vowel ratings differed between participant groups, suggesting preserved implicit processing of emotional prosody in Amusia. These findings can be integrated into previous data showing preserved implicit processing of pitch and emotion in Amusia alongside deficits in explicit recognition tasks. They are thus further supporting the hypothesis of impaired conscious analysis of pitch and timbre in this neurodevelopmental disorder.
Philippe Albouy - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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altered intrinsic connectivity of the auditory cortex in congenital Amusia
Journal of Neurophysiology, 2016Co-Authors: Yohana Lévêque, Philippe Albouy, Anne Caclin, Baptiste Fauvel, Mathilde Groussard, Herve Platel, Barbara TillmannAbstract:Congenital Amusia, a neurodevelopmental disorder of music perception and production, has been associated with abnormal anatomical and functional connectivity in a right frontotemporal pathway. To investigate whether spontaneous connectivity in brain networks involving the auditory cortex is altered in the amusic brain, we ran a seed-based connectivity analysis, contrasting at-rest functional MRI data of amusic and matched control participants. Our results reveal reduced frontotemporal connectivity in Amusia during resting state, as well as an overconnectivity between the auditory cortex and the default mode network (DMN). The findings suggest that the auditory cortex is intrinsically more engaged toward internal processes and less available to external stimuli in amusics compared with controls. Beyond Amusia, our findings provide new evidence for the link between cognitive deficits in pathology and abnormalities in the connectivity between sensory areas and the DMN at rest.
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discrimination of tonal and atonal music in congenital Amusia the advantage of implicit tasks
Neuropsychologia, 2016Co-Authors: Barbara Tillmann, Philippe Albouy, Anne Caclin, Philippe Lalitte, Emmanuel BigandAbstract:Congenital Amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder of music perception and production, which has been attributed to a major deficit in pitch processing. While most studies and diagnosis tests have used explicit investigation methods, recent studies using implicit investigation approaches have revealed some unimpaired pitch structure processing in congenital Amusia. The present study investigated amusic individuals' processing of tonal structures (e.g., musical structures respecting the Western tonal system) via three different questions. Amusic participants and their matched controls judged tonal versions (original musical excerpts) and atonal versions (with manipulated pitch content to remove tonal structures) of 12 musical pieces. For each piece, participants answered three questions that required judgments from different perspectives: an explicit structural one, a personal, emotional one and a more social one (judging the perception of others). Results revealed that amusic individuals' judgments differed between tonal and atonal versions. However, the question type influenced the extent of the revealed structure processing: while amusic individuals were impaired for the question requiring explicit structural judgments, they performed as well as their matched controls for the two other questions. Together with other recent studies, these findings suggest that congenital Amusia might be related to a disorder of the conscious access to music processing rather than music processing per se.
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pitch responsive cortical regions in congenital Amusia
The Journal of Neuroscience, 2016Co-Authors: Sam V Normanhaignere, Philippe Albouy, Anne Caclin, Josh H Mcdermott, Nancy Kanwisher, Barbara TillmannAbstract:Congenital Amusia is a lifelong deficit in music perception thought to reflect an underlying impairment in the perception and memory of pitch. The neural basis of amusic impairments is actively debated. Some prior studies have suggested that Amusia stems from impaired connectivity between auditory and frontal cortex. However, it remains possible that impairments in pitch coding within auditory cortex also contribute to the disorder, in part because prior studies have not measured responses from the cortical regions most implicated in pitch perception in normal individuals. We addressed this question by measuring fMRI responses in 11 subjects with Amusia and 11 age- and education-matched controls to a stimulus contrast that reliably identifies pitch-responsive regions in normal individuals: harmonic tones versus frequency-matched noise. Our findings demonstrate that amusic individuals with a substantial pitch perception deficit exhibit clusters of pitch-responsive voxels that are comparable in extent, selectivity, and anatomical location to those of control participants. We discuss possible explanations for why amusics might be impaired at perceiving pitch relations despite exhibiting normal fMRI responses to pitch in their auditory cortex: (1) individual neurons within the pitch-responsive region might exhibit abnormal tuning or temporal coding not detectable with fMRI, (2) anatomical tracts that link pitch-responsive regions to other brain areas (e.g., frontal cortex) might be altered, and (3) cortical regions outside of pitch-responsive cortex might be abnormal. The ability to identify pitch-responsive regions in individual amusic subjects will make it possible to ask more precise questions about their role in Amusia in future work.
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Impaired short-term memory for pitch in congenital Amusia.
Brain research, 2015Co-Authors: Barbara Tillmann, Yohana Lévêque, Lesly Fornoni, Philippe Albouy, Anne CaclinAbstract:Abstract Congenital Amusia is a neuro-developmental disorder of music perception and production. The hypothesis is that the musical deficits arise from altered pitch processing, with impairments in pitch discrimination (i.e., pitch change detection, pitch direction discrimination and identification) and short-term memory. The present review article focuses on the deficit of short-term memory for pitch. Overall, the data discussed here suggest impairments at each level of processing in short-term memory tasks; starting with the encoding of the pitch information and the creation of the adequate memory trace, the retention of the pitch traces over time as well as the recollection and comparison of the stored information with newly incoming information. These impairments have been related to altered brain responses in a distributed fronto-temporal network, associated with decreased connectivity between these structures, as well as in abnormalities in the connectivity between the two auditory cortices. In contrast, amusic participants׳ short-term memory abilities for verbal material are preserved. These findings show that short-term memory deficits in congenital Amusia are specific to pitch, suggesting a pitch-memory system that is, at least partly, separated from verbal memory. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled SI: Auditory working memory .
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altered retrieval of melodic information in congenital Amusia insights from dynamic causal modeling of meg data
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2015Co-Authors: Barbara Tillmann, Philippe Albouy, Jeremie Mattout, Gaa Tan Sanchez, Anne CaclinAbstract:Congenital Amusia is a neuro-developmental disorder that primarily manifests as a difficulty in the perception and memory of pitch-based materials, including music. Recent findings have shown that the amusic brain exhibits altered functioning of a fronto-temporal network during pitch perception and memory. Within this network, during the encoding of melodies, a decreased right backward frontal-to-temporal connectivity was reported in Amusia, along with an abnormal connectivity within and between auditory cortices. The present study investigated whether connectivity patterns between these regions were affected during the retrieval of melodies. Amusics and controls had to indicate whether sequences of six tones that were presented in pairs were the same or different. When melodies were different only one tone changed in the second melody. Brain responses to the changed tone in “Different” trials and to its equivalent (original) tone in “Same” trials were compared between groups using Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM). DCM results confirmed that congenital Amusia is characterized by an altered effective connectivity within and between the two auditory cortices during sound processing. Furthermore, right temporal-to-frontal message passing was altered in comparison to controls, with an increase in “Same” trials and a decrease in “Different” trials. An additional analysis in control participants emphasized that the detection of an unexpected event in the typically functioning brain is supported by right fronto-temporal connections. The results can be interpreted in a predictive coding framework as reflecting an abnormal prediction error sent by temporal auditory regions towards frontal areas in the amusic brain.