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PubMed2004

N100m in adults possessing absolute pitch.

We recorded the auditory evoked magnetic fields from adults with and without absolute pitch under the following conditions: hearing 1000 Hz pure tones inattentively (single tone session) and listening to eight random tones and identifying each tone (labeling session). In the adults with absolute pitch, the bilateral N100m dipole moments increased significantly in the labeling session. While, in the adults without absolute pitch, the left N100m dipole moment alone increased in the labeling session. These results suggest that the adults with absolute pitch execute the labeling task in the bilateral auditory cortices with interhemispheric cooperation, which does not operate in the adults without absolute pitch.

Adult↗
PubMed2005

Increased right auditory cortex activity in absolute pitch possessors.

We recorded the auditory-evoked magnetic fields from children and adults with absolute pitch during the following tasks: (1) hearing 1000 Hz pure tones inattentively, (2) hearing eight random tones inattentively and (3) listening to eight random tones and identifying each tone. In children with absolute pitch, there was no significant positive correlation between the appearance rate of N100m and the kinds of tasks. In adults with absolute pitch, only the right N100m dipole moments increased significantly in tasks (1) and (2). The present results suggest that the circuit for labeling in the right auditory cortex may lose a function from childhood to adulthood, which reveals neuroplasticity in the development of absolute pitch ability.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2006

Differential cortical processing of location and pitch changes in dichotic pitch.

The objective of this study was to determine whether the auditory mismatch negativity can be elicited by changes in spatial and nonspatial cues within dichotic pitches. Participants were presented with blocks of standard dichotic pitch stimuli in which location or pitch was occasionally varied. A mismatch negativity was reliably elicited by deviant locations; in contrast, no measurable mismatch negativity response was found for deviant pitches. A separate psychophysical screening procedure ruled out the possibility that participants could not hear the pitch deviations. The results indicate that spatial and nonspatial features of dichotic pitch receive differential processing at a preattentive level of analysis within the auditory system and are supportive of recent notions of dual processing streams in audition.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2006

Cortical and subcortical sides of auditory rhythms and pitches.

It is commonly assumed that different perceptual qualities arising from sensory stimuli depend on their physical nature being transformed by specific peripheral receptors, for example, colour, vibration or heat. A notable unexplained exception is the low and high repetition rates of any sound perceived as rhythm or pitch, respectively. Using auditory discrimination learning in bilaterally auditory cortex ablated animals, we demonstrate that the perceptual quality of sounds depends on the way the brain processes stimuli rather than on their physical nature. In this context, cortical and subcortical processing steps have different roles in analysing different aspects of sounds with the complete analysis accomplished not before information converges in the auditory cortex.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2006

Testing for causality with transcranial direct current stimulation: pitch memory and the left supramarginal gyrus.

Neuroimaging studies have implicated the left supramarginal gyrus in short-term auditory memory processing, including memory for pitch. The present study investigated the causal role of the left supramarginal gyrus in short-term pitch memory by comparing the effects of cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation when applied over the left or right supramarginal gyrus with sham transcranial direct current stimulation. Only cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation over the left supramarginal gyrus had a detrimental effect on short-term pitch-memory performance in 11 adult participants. These results provide support for the important role of the left supramarginal gyrus in short-term memory for pitch information, and they further demonstrate the potential of transcranial direct current stimulation to modulate the functional contribution of a brain area to a particular cognitive process.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed2006

Frequency response areas of mouse inferior colliculus neurons: II. Critical bands.

Critical bands are perceptual filters that detect and separate spectral peaks in complex sounds. Here, we show that the main properties of psychophysically defined critical bands, as measured in narrow-band noise masking tests (species-specific frequency dependence and intensity independence of the bandwidths), are present in single neurons of the mouse's central nucleus of the inferior colliculus. Bandwidths of critical bands amount to, on average, 3/8-1/3 octave related to the neurons' characteristic frequencies. They are not determined by the shapes of the neurons' excitatory receptive fields. The results support the view that frequency resolution in the auditory system is shaped to its perceptual level in the main nucleus of the auditory midbrain.

Animals↗
PubMed2006

Neural correlates of absolute pitch differ between blind and sighted musicians.

Several reports have indicated a higher incidence of absolute pitch in blind than in sighted musicians. Employing a pitch memory task, we examined whether a blind absolute pitch musician would rely on different neural correlates than a group of sighted absolute pitch musicians. The blind musician showed significantly more activation of bihemispheric visual association areas, lingual gyrus, parietal and frontal areas than the sighted musicians. Sighted musicians showed more activation of the right primary auditory cortex and the cerebellum when compared with the blind musician. These differences in the activation pattern suggest the use of a different neural network including visual association areas while performing pitch categorization and identification in this blind musician in comparison with sighted musicians.

Acoustic Stimulation↗
PubMed2005

Recording human evoked potentials that follow the pitch contour of a natural vowel.

We investigated whether pitch-synchronous neural activity could be recorded in humans, with a natural vowel and a vowel in which the fundamental frequency was suppressed. Small variations of speech periodicity were detected in the evoked responses using a fine structure spectrograph (FSS). A significant response (P < 0.001) was measured in all seven normal subjects even when the fundamental frequency was suppressed, and it very accurately tracked the acoustic pitch contour (normalized mean absolute error < 0.57%). Small variations in speech periodicity, which humans can detect, are therefore available to the perceptual system as pitch-synchronous neural firing. These findings suggest that the measurement of pitch-evoked responses may be a viable tool for objective speech audiometry.

Adult↗
PubMed2003

Pitch memory, labelling and disembedding in autism.

BACKGROUND: Autistic musical savants invariably possess absolute pitch ability and are able to disembed individual musical tones from chords. Enhanced pitch discrimination and memory has been found in non-savant individuals with autism who also show superior performance on visual disembedding tasks. These experiments investigate the extent that enhanced disembedding ability will be found within the musical domain in autism. METHOD: High-functioning children with autism, together with age- and intelligence-matched controls, participated in three experiments testing pitch memory, labelling and chord disembedding. RESULTS: The findings from experiment 1 showed enhanced pitch memory and labelling in the autism group. In experiment 2, when subjects were pre-exposed to labelled individual tones, superior chord segmentation was also found. However, in experiment 3, when disembedding performance was less reliant on pitch memory, no group differences emerged and the children with autism, like controls, perceived musical chords holistically. CONCLUSION: These findings indicate that pitch memory and labelling is superior in autism and can facilitate performance on musical disembedding tasks. However, when task performance does not rely on long-term pitch memory, autistic children, like controls, succumb to the Gestalt qualities of chords.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2005

Is the failure to detect stimulus deviance during sleep due to a rapid fading of sensory memory or a degradation of stimulus encoding?

The mismatch negativity (MMN) is thought to reflect the outcome of a system responsible for the detection of change in an otherwise repetitive, homogenous acoustic environment. This process depends on the storage and maintenance of a sensory representation of the frequently presented stimulus to which the deviant stimulus is compared. Few studies have been able to record the MMN in non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. This pattern of results might be explained by either a rapid fading of sensory memory or an inhibition of stimulus input prior to entry into the cortical MMN generator site. The present study used a very rapid rate of presentation in an attempt to capture mismatch-related negativity prior to the fading of sensory memory. Auditory event-related potentials were recorded from 12 subjects during a single sleep period. A 1000 Hz standard stimulus was presented every 150 ms. At random, on 6.6% of the trials, the standard was changed to either a large 2000 Hz or a small 1100 Hz deviant. In wakefulness, the large deviant elicited an extended negativity that was reduced in amplitude following the presentation of the small deviant. This negativity was also apparent during REM sleep following the presentation of the large deviant. These deviant-related negativities (DRNs) were probably a composite of N1 and MMN activity. During NREM sleep (stage 2 and slow-wave sleep), only the large deviant continued to elicit a DRN. However this DRN might be overlapped by the initial activity of a component that is unique to sleep, the N350. There was little evidence of the DRN or the MMN during sleep following the presentation of the small deviant. A rapid rate of presentation, therefore, does not preserve the MMN following small deviance within sleep. It is possible that inhibition of sensory input occurs before entry into the MMN generating system in the temporal cortex.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1995

Reliability of the task-related component (P3b) of P3 event-related potentials.

Within session and between session reliabilities of the task-related component (P3b) of the P3 measures (amplitude, area and latency) and their habituation across eight sessions separated by 7-10 days, except for an interval of 1 month between the 6th and 7th sessions, were studied based on the difference waves, which were obtained by subtracting the ignored infrequent event-related potentials (ERP) from the target ERP elicited by a standard auditory oddball paradigm with eyes-open or eyes-closed conditions in 10 normal subjects. The within session reliabilities represented as Pearson correlation coefficients (r) were 0.57-0.66 for the three measures except for those for the latency and amplitude under the eyes-closed condition. The between session reliabilities expressed as intraclass correlation coefficients (R) ranged from 0.54 to 0.60 except for that for latency under eyes-closed conditions. Long-term habituation occurred within the first six sessions for the P3b amplitude and area, and dishabituation took place in the 7th session after an interval of 1 month, whereas no such phenomenon was observed for the P3b latency. Implications of the present results are discussed in terms of the clinical application of the P3 measures.

Adult↗
PubMed2006

Infants' memory for musical performances.

We evaluated 6- and 7-month-olds' preference and memory for expressive recordings of sung lullabies. In Experiment 1, both age groups preferred lower-pitched to higher-pitched renditions of unfamiliar lullabies. In Experiment 2, infants were tested after 2 weeks of daily exposure to a lullaby at one pitch level. Seven-month-olds listened significantly longer to the lullaby at a novel pitch level than at the original pitch level. Six-month-olds showed no preference but their low-pitch preference was eliminated. We conclude that infants' memory for musical performances is enhanced by the ecological validity of the materials. Moreover, infants' pitch preferences are influenced by their previous exposure and by the nature of the music.

Child Development↗
PubMed1994

Developmental differences in infant attention to the spectral properties of infant-directed speech.

Across several independent studies, infants from a few days to 9 months of age have shown preferences for infant-directed (ID) over adult-directed (AD) speech. Moreover, 4-month-olds have been shown to prefer sine-wave analogs of the fundamental frequency of ID speech, suggesting that exaggerated pitch contours are prepotent stimuli for infants. The possibility of similar preferences by 1-month-olds was examined in a series of experiments, using a fixation-based preference procedure. Results from the first 2 experiments showed that 1-month-olds did not prefer the lower-frequency pitch characteristics of ID speech, even though 1-month-olds were able to discriminate low-pass filtered ID and AD speech. Since low-pass filtering may have distorted the fundamental frequency characteristics of ID speech, 1-month-olds were also tested with sine-wave analogs of the fundamental frequencies of the ID utterances. Infants in this third experiment also showed no preference for ID pitch contours. In the fourth experiment, 1-month-olds preferred a natural recording of ID speech over a version which preserved only its lower frequency prosodic features. From these results, it is argued that, although young infants are similar to older infants in their attraction to ID speech, their preferences depend on a wider range of acoustic features (e.g., spectral structure). It is suggested that exaggerated pitch contours which characterize ID speech may become salient communicative signals for infants through language-rich, interactive experiences with caretakers and increased perceptual acuity over the first months after birth.

Child Development↗
PubMed1992

Blood pressure reactivity to active and passive behavioral conditions in hypertensives and normotensives.

Blood pressure reactivity and passive behavioral tasks was studied in patients with mild essential hypertension and normotensive controls. The passive condition included 10 presentations of a 6 sec, 78 dB, 1000 Hz tone without any response requirements. In the active condition subjects were given an additional 10 tone presentations and asked to press a push-button at tone termination. The absolute and percent increase in systolic blood pressure from rest was greater in hypertensives than normotensives in response to the active condition but similar to the passive condition. It is concluded that patients with hypertension compared to normotensive controls show exaggerated blood pressure reactivity to tasks involving active but not passive coping efforts. Since the tasks used to induce active and passive coping in the present study were identical apart from coping requirements, the notion that the activity dimension in and of itself modulates reactivity differences between patients and controls is supported.

Adaptation, Psychological↗
PubMed1993

Interhemispheric transmission time in an auditory two-choice reaction task.

An unimanual auditory choice reaction task was performed by 16 right-handed male subjects. Upon release of a central ready button subjects pressed a target button on their right or left side depending on the ear in which they heard a tone. A significant 'Ear' x 'Hand' interaction effect appeared on both reaction time (RT) and the first component of movement (MT1), showing that uncrossed conditions give rise to faster responses than crossed conditions. Interhemispheric transmission time (IHTT) was estimated from the difference of response latency in the two types of conditions. No asymmetry in the speed of information transfer between the hemispheres was found. IHTT was 16 ms in the case of RT, which supported previous research with visual reaction tasks, and IHTT for MT1 was 13 ms, which has not been reported before.

Adult↗
PubMed2001

The temporal representation of the delay of iterated rippled noise in the ventral cochlear nucleus of the guinea-pig.

1. We have examined the temporal discharge patterns of single units from the ventral cochlear nucleus (VCN) of anaesthetized guinea-pigs in response to iterated rippled noise (IRN). The pitch range evoked by the stimuli was from 32 to 1000 Hz. 2. Single units were classified into four groups using existing classification schemes: primary-like (PL), onset (O), sustained chopper (CS) and transient chopper (CT). For all unit types the delay of the IRN stimuli was well represented in the all-order interspike interval histograms (ISIHs). 3. A subset of the onset units (onset-chopper, OC) showed a clear preference for some delays of the IRN in their first-order interval statistics. We describe this delay preference as 'periodicity tuning'. The delay at which the pitch estimate was at its maximum was designated its best periodicity. The range of best periodicities for OC units was 3.75-13 ms (between 77 and 267 Hz). 4. The other unit types also showed enhancement of the first-order interval statistics at the delay of the IRN. The range of best periodicities was 1.4-8.8 ms (113-714 Hz) for the CT group, 2.25-10.8 ms (93-444 Hz) for the CS group and 0.5-4.6 ms (217-2000 Hz) for the PL group. 5. The correlation between the maximum interval enhancement observed in response to the IRN stimuli and the peak in the first-order ISIH in response to white noise was 0.81 for OC units, 0.72 for CS units, 0.44 for CT units and -0.15 for PL units. 6. These results demonstrate that all unit types in the VCN can enhance the representation of the delay of IRN using first-order interspike intervals (ISIs) over a range of periodicities. CS and OC units show the greatest range of best periodicities and they are well-suited to encode the delay of IRN in their first-order ISIs for a wide range of pitches.

Action Potentials↗
PubMed1990

Awareness of P300-related cognitive processes: a signal detection approach.

Although the P300 component of the human event-related potential is purported to indicate consciousness of an event, it is unclear which of the P300-related processes, if any, are accessible to awareness. This study explored awareness of such processes in Bernoulli series of auditory stimuli using signal detection theory and selective averaging of ERPs according to the subjects' classifications. Following targets eliciting appropriate P300 amplitudes, the subject was requested to classify his brain response as small, medium, or large, whereupon visual feedback was given about the correctness of the response. Averaging the ERPs according to the subjects' classifications showed P300 amplitudes to increase with the classification category, whereas the prestimulus and post-P300 event-related potentials were unrelated to the category. Signal detection analysis revealed non-zero sensitivity measures for the P300 amplitude categories. Although no conclusive suggestion can be made at present as to the basis of the P300 discrimination ability found here, it was possible to rule out electro-ocular and electromyographic activity, the preceding auditory stimulus, and the prior feedback given, as cues for discrimination.

Adult↗