title: Does tonality boost short-term memory in congenital amusia?
abstract: Congenital amusia is a neuro-developmental disorder of music perception and production. Recent findings have demonstrated that this deficit is linked to an impaired short-term memory for tone sequences. As it has been shown before that non-musicians' implicit knowledge of musical regularities can improve short-term memory for tone information, the present study investigated if this type of implicit knowledge could also influence amusics' short-term memory performance. Congenital amusics and their matched controls, who were non-musicians, had to indicate whether sequences of five tones, presented in pairs, were the same or different; half of the pairs respected musical regularities (tonal sequences) and the other half did not (atonal sequences). As previously reported for non-musician participants, the control participants showed better performance (as measured with d') for tonal sequences than for atonal ones. While this improvement was not observed in amusics, both control and amusic participants showed faster response times for tonal sequences than for atonal sequences. These findings suggest that some implicit processing of tonal structures is potentially preserved in congenital amusia. This observation is encouraging as it strengthens the perspective to exploit implicit knowledge to help reducing pitch perception and memory deficits in amusia.
authors.affiliation: CNRS, UMR5292, INSERM, U1028, Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, Auditory Cognition and Psychoacoustics Team, Lyon F-69000, France; INSERM, U1028, CNRS, UMR5292, Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, Brain Dynamics and Cognition Team, Lyon F-69000, France; University Lyon 1, Lyon F-69000, France. Electronic address: philippe.albouy@inserm.fr.
authors.forename: Philippe
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Albouy
authors.forename: Katrin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Schulze
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Caclin
authors.forename: Barbara
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Tillmann
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001308:Auditory Perceptual Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D009146:Music; D010898:Pitch Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D011930:Reaction Time; D013067:Speech Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Auditory short-term memory; Implicit processing; Musical structure; Pitch; Response time; Tone deafness