title: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, 95 Union St, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand.
authors.forename: Katie M
authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Douglas
authors.forename: David K
authors.initials: DK
authors.lastname: Bilkey
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination / Q000502:physiology; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology; D009146:Music / Q000523:psychology*; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D010897:Pitch Discrimination / Q000502:physiology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology