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Results for “Pitch Perception”

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PubMed2000

Impaired two-tone processing at rapid rates in male rats with induced microgyria.

We previously reported that adult male rats with bilateral induced microgyria exhibit deficits in rapid auditory processing, which appear similar to auditory processing deficits seen in individuals with developmental language disabilities. The current study was designed to further elaborate that finding using an improved paradigm in which stimulus duration was uncoupled from testing experience and learning effects. Specifically, two-tone stimuli with durations of 540, 390, 332 and 249 ms were all presented within a single test session in a modified operant conditioning paradigm. Subjects were tested over a period of 12 days using this variable-stimulus format. Results confirmed microgyric male rats were impaired only in processing two-tone stimuli presented at rapid rates (i.e., 249 ms duration). Thus the current results support the previously observed link between focal malformations and deficits in rapid auditory processing.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2000

Skill acquisition in music performance: relations between planning and temporal control.

We investigated the acquisition of music performance skills in novice and expert pianists. Temporal disruptions in novice performances coincided with constraints in planning capacities. Child and adult pianists ranging in age (9-26 years), training (3-15 years) and sight-reading ability learned to perform a novel musical piece in eleven practice trials. Computer-detected pitch and timing errors revealed: (1) gradual improvements in performance tempo and pitch accuracy with skill level and practice, generally fitting a power function; (2) a relative-timing/pitch accuracy trade-off and high incidence of simultaneous pitch/time errors; (3) improvements in relative timing (temporal continuity, underlying beat, metrical structure) with skill and practice; and (4) increased anticipatory behavior and a greater range of planning with skill and practice. A strong positive relationship between the mastery of temporal constraints and planning abilities within performance suggests that these two cognitive indicators are closely related and may arise from segmentation processes during performance. Examination of sequence timing may explicate planning abilities that underlie many complex skills.

Adolescent↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Dissociating aspects of temporal and frequency processing: a functional ERP study in humans.

An event-related potential (ERP) study was conducted, in order to dissociate brain functions associated with temporal information processing and processing of frequency information. Twelve participants were presented with both a temporal generalization and a pitch generalization task. In both tasks, exactly the same set of stimuli was presented to prevent stimulus-specific influences on ERP patterns. Participants had to decide whether or not an auditory stimulus matched a previously memorized standard stimulus, either with respect to pitch or duration. Analysis of ERPs revealed an increased negativity for the temporal discrimination task at fronto/central electrode sites. This effect was observed between 150 msec and 1,000 msec. At posterior sites, however, there was an increased positivity between 500 and 1,000 msec for the temporal generalization task. The differential topological activation patterns suggest more pronounced utilization of executive working-memory ressources for processing of temporal than for processing of pitch information.

Adult↗
PubMed1990

How knowledge of the song influences the matching of "melodies" to rhythm sequences tapped in the right and left palms.

Previous work by O'Boyle and Sanford (1988) has demonstrated that the right hemisphere (RH) is superior to the left hemisphere (LH) in the matching of tape-recorded melodies to rhythm sequences tapped in the palms of the hands. This asymmetrical advantage was attributed to a RH superiority in the perceptual processing of intonation as compared to the rhythm component of these musical stimuli. In the present study, subjects were taught that the monotone sound of two wooden drumsticks struck together in a specified rhythm actually represented non-melodic translations of songs with identifiable melodies. After such mental associations had been formed, these non-melodic stimuli (which produced no asymmetric performance in Exp. 2 of the O'Boyle and Sanford study), now produced a RH advantage that was comparable to that induced by the original melodies. This finding suggests that the physical presence of intonation and its subsequent perceptual analysis, are not necessarily critical to the RH advantage reported by O'Boyle and Sanford (1988). Rather, the asymmetry may be related to a superior ability of the RH to generate and/or manipulate echoic images in memory.

Adult↗
PubMed1978

Left hemisphere dominance for rhythmic elements in dichotically-presented melodies.

Right ear superiority was found for two groups of 24 subjects on a dichotic listening test of melodies each differing only in rhythm. In addition, no ear difference was found in the same two groups for a dichotic melodies test differing only in pitch or pitch pattern. Finally, the usual left ear superiority was seen for dichotic presentation of chords and the usual right ear superiority was seen for the dichotic presentation of digits. The results imply that in neither of the non-verbal (melodies) tests was the right hemisphere superior to the left. In fact for one test the reverse was true: the left hemisphere was superior to the right for melody recognition based on a rhythm cue. The apparent conflict between this and previous studies is explained by the notion that it is not the stimuli per se that govern hemispheric dominance, but rather the cognitive functioning required by the left and right hemispheres in order to process them.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1984

Alterations in auditory processing of speech stimuli during aging in healthy subjects.

Studies of auditory processing during aging in man have not provided a consensus on whether aging affects the ability to process speech stimuli. To evaluate the relationship between speech recognition tasks and age, we examined 36 male subjects between the ages of 21 and 83 years, who were screened for the absence of disease, particularly in the cardiovascular and neurologic systems. Measures were obtained on the following tests: pure tone thresholds, speech reception threshold, speech discrimination, low-pass filtered speech, and binaural fusion. A statistically significant correlation was found between pure tone thresholds and age for all frequencies. When the effect of peripheral hearing loss was taken into account, speech measures did not correlate with age, with the exception of low-pass filtered speech in the left ear. Our findings suggest that the aging process in healthy man is not necessarily accompanied by deficits in the processing of speech stimuli beyond those which are due to peripheral hearing loss.

Adult↗
PubMed1989

Intact absolute pitch ability after left temporal lobectomy.

A 17-year old pianist who possessed absolute pitch underwent an anterior left temporal lobectomy for the relief of intractable seizures. Prior to surgery he showed some fluctuation in the pattern of errors in notating single piano tones. Postoperatively he improved on this task, and one year later his performance was essentially perfect. On a short-term retention task given postoperatively he showed the expected effect of a left temporal-lobe and hippocampal lesion: he was impaired in the recall of a three-letter sequence after 18 sec with an interpolated verbal task. In contrast, retention of the names of three piano notes was excellent under the same conditions, as it is for control subjects with absolute pitch. The results are interpreted in terms of the dissociation between verbal mechanisms and those involved in the coding of pitch, and the seeming immunity of many musical abilities to the effects of left-hemisphere lesions.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2001

Differences in pitch between tones affect behaviour even when incorrectly identified in direction.

The ability to detect differences between simultaneously presented contra- and ipsilesional stimuli but not to identify the former on neurological patients with the symptom termed 'extinction' has given rise to the hypothesis that extinguished stimuli have impaired access to attentive processing but are detected pre-attentively. Such a dissociation found in normal participants with experimentally degraded sensory information, and its absence in equivalent tasks in terms of the amount of information required has, however, led to an alternative hypothesis that the lesser amount of information required to perform same/different judgements is sufficient to explain this dissociation. In the present paper, the correctness and reaction time (RT) of normal participants' forced-choice decisions about whether the second (comparison) tone of a pair of tones is higher/lower in pitch than the first (standard) tone were measured. It was found that even when participants' decisions were incorrect, the RT of these decisions varied as a function of the magnitude of the difference in pitch between the two tones. The first hypothesis was supported in the sense that stimulus differences might affect behaviour even without their successful attentive processing in normal participants.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2002

Functional cerebral asymmetries of pitch processing during dichotic stimulus application: a whole-head magnetoencephalography study.

Dichotic listening (DL) studies indicate higher proficiency of the right cerebral hemisphere in processing the pitch of auditory events. Especially, acoustic stimuli of a rich harmonic structure such as square waves (complex tones) elicit a left ear advantage (LEA) under dichotic stimulus application. In order to investigate the timing of early sensory encoding at the level of the supratemporal plane, whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG; 151 channels) recordings were performed in 20 right-handed subjects using an oddball paradigm based on dichotically applied complex tones. In contrast to electroencephalography (EEG) and event related potentials (ERP), this technique separately measures neuronal activity of left and right auditory cortex. Neuromagnetic responses were obtained both during preattentive stimulus processing, as well as during a pitch detection task. Rare stimuli presented to the left ear elicited a stronger magnetic analogue of mismatch negativity (MMNm) over both hemispheres and gave rise to shorter latencies of the contralateral mismatch fields than right ear deviants. In conclusion, the present data provide first evidence for functional laterality effects even at the level of preattentive pitch processing within the auditory cortex.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed1998

Verbal and music dichotic listening tasks reveal variations in functional cerebral asymmetry across the menstrual cycle that are phase and task dependent.

Two dichotic listening tests, one a verbal consonant-vowel identification task, the other a musical chord recognition task, were administered to 32 women at two points during the menstrual cycle, menses (when oestrogen is low) and the midluteal phase (when oestrogen is high), in a counterbalanced repeated measures design. The degree of asymmetry changed across the cycle for both syllables and music. The right ear advantage recorded for the verbal task was greater during the midluteal phase than during menses. The left ear advantage recorded for the music task was greater during menses than during the midluteal phase. These reciprocal changes in asymmetry were the result of consistent changes in ear performance. From menses to the midluteal phase, left ear (right hemisphere) performance fell significantly for both tasks whereas right ear (left hemisphere) performance showed a small, but non-significant, increase. The findings are discussed in the light of evidence for phasic activational effects of gonadal steroids on both asymmetry and cognition which provide an explanation for the sometimes elusive nature and small effect size of sex differences in these characteristics. The relationships between sex differences in asymmetry and cognition are re-examined.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2003

The effect of spectral manipulations on the identification of affective and linguistic prosody.

We investigated the effect of various spectral manipulations on the identification of sentential prosody. Two main categories of prosody--affective (happy, angry, sad) and linguistic (statement, question, continuation)--were studied. Thirty-six subjects were presented with stimuli that were recorded by a female native speaker of American English. The stimuli were digitally manipulated to create synthesized, band-pass filtered (F0-range and F2/F3-range) and re-entrant (pitch only version of stimulus is convolved with a steady-state signal) conditions. Results of a forced-choice discrimination paradigm showed that, in general, performance is remarkably robust despite spectral manipulation, even when there is relatively little spectral information. However, performance was significantly degraded in the low band-pass and re-entrant conditions. These observations are discussed in light of the relevance of the fundamental frequency as well as syllabification for the analysis of prosodic information.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1994

Context and tone conditioning are selectively impaired by ethanol in the preweanling rat: effects of dose and time of administration.

Depending on dose and task requirements, ethanol can have either a facilitative or an impairing influence on learning. Some explanations for this dichotomy have considered ethanol's suppression of behavioral variability and processing of incidental stimuli (e.g., context). The present study examined the effect of ethanol on context and conditioned stimulus (CS) learning in the preweanling rat. To assess state-dependent effects, a drug dissociation design was used. Learning to both context and CS were analyzed within each dose of ethanol (0, 1.2, 1.6, or 2.0 g/kg) and a trend analysis was conducted to determine dose-response relationships as a function of train-test state. The 1.2 g/kg dose of ethanol did not affect conditioning to either the context or the CS. A 1.6 g/kg dose tended to disrupt context, but not CS, conditioning. The influence of 2.0 g/kg ethanol depended on train-test conditions. Ethanol administration prior to training resulted in the stronger impairment of CS learning while context conditioning was most disrupted if ethanol was given only prior to testing. The results suggest that ethanol selectively attenuates processing of stimuli, possibly dependent on relative saliency at the time of testing.

Animals↗
PubMed1999

Contralateral induction by frequency spectrum in hallucinating schizophrenics.

Seventeen schizophrenic patients who had all experienced auditory hallucinations were compared with 14 subjects of a reference group on a test of contralateral induction. Contralateral induction means that a sound is illusively heard as coming from a location where it belongs according to its spectral content. The phenomenon is connected with a simultaneous relative elimination of masking. The schizophrenic subjects deviated from the reference group in several aspects. Some of them did not hear the sound being induced to the contralateral side, which it was for all reference subjects. Another subgroup of the schizophrenics noticed the induction unusually early with a prolonged experience of it, and finally some of them experienced the induction now and then. The aberrations were interpreted as rigidity of adaptation on the one hand and as effects of an enhanced sensitivity on the other. Discontinuity, meaning that the fluency in mental processing is broken, was interpreted to cause the ratings of the third group of schizophrenics in this sample, who heard the contralateral induction now and then. These phenomena are clearly reminiscent of descriptions in research reports, and witnessed by clinical experience of the schizophrenic disturbance. The results represent another example of discontinuous neurophysiological functions between neural systems and between individuals suffering from schizophrenia.

Adult↗
PubMed2000

Cross-modal reorganization of human cortical functions.

Recent technological development has opened fascinating opportunities in research on cognitive functions of the human brain. For example, cortical representations of sensory functions and their reorganization, which have been studied thoroughly in animals, are far better understood in humans now than they were only a decade ago. Hemodynamic and electromagnetic studies have demonstrated that a modality-specific brain area that is totally deprived of its normal sensory input becomes responsive to stimulation of other modalities. The functional significance of this cross-modal activation was recently indicated by, for example, studies showing that the occipital cortex of the blind is activated by sound changes, when the task is to detect these changes. Moreover, trans-cranial magnetic stimulation applied to the occipital cortex of blind individuals results in distortions and omissions of letters in Braille text being read by the subject. Contrary to prevailing views, cross-modal neural reorganization might, as shown by recent results, take place even in the mature human brain.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

A demonstration of within-subjects latent inhibition in the human: limitations and advantages.

The magnitude of latent inhibition (LI) (a retardation of associative learning due to prior exposure to the conditioning stimulus) was measured in healthy volunteers using both a within- and a between-subjects version of the task. Reliable LI was demonstrated for the within-subjects paradigm (using a design that fully counter-balanced stimulus of pre-exposure) but the magnitude of the effect was smaller than for the between-subjects version. Measures of schizotypal personality were found to be associated with reduced LI for the between-subjects task, but not for the within-subjects task. We hypothesised that for the within-subjects task learning about the first stimulus-consequence association (usually that for the not pre-exposed (NPE) stimulus) primes learning about the second stimulus, thus reducing the effect of pre-exposure and restricting the range of LI scores. In turn, this restricted range of LI scores does not allow subtle differences on schizotypal personality dimensions to reveal their effect using this within-subjects paradigm. In conclusion, a within-subjects LI task has been developed which is not open to explanation in terms of differences in stimulus salience. However, the limited range of pre-exposure scores in the current within-subject paradigm may severely limit it is use as an indicator of subtle performance changes.

Adolescent↗