Pitch memory, labelling and disembedding in autism

Abstract

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.

Fragile Spectral and Temporal Auditory Processing in Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Early Language Delay

“…A closer look at the literature, however, reveals that surprisingly few studies actually estimated pitch discrimination thresholds for pure tones in ASD. The majority of studies investigated more advanced pitch processing aspects like categorization, labelling, memory or disembedding, and they often used much more complex auditory stimuli or speech stimuli (e.g., Foxton et al 2003;Heaton 2003;Heaton et al 2005Heaton et al , 2008bJärvinen-Pasley and Heaton 2007;Järvinen-Pasley et al 2008a, b;Mottron et al 2000). Only three studies used a similar adaptive staircase procedure (as we did) to assess pure tone pitch processing (Bhatara et al 2013;Bonnel et al 2010;Jones et al 2009).…”

Intact Spectral but Abnormal Temporal Processing of Auditory Stimuli in Autism

“…Several studies had already found enhanced simple lowlevel visual processing (O'Riordan et al 2001;Plaisted et al 1998) and spared (Spencer et al 2000;Blake et al 2003) or diminished complex low-level visual processing (Milne et al 2002). In the auditory domain, enhanced simple low-level processing had been reported for pitch discrimination and chord disembedding (Bonnel et al 2003;Heaton 2003), in which perceptual performance depends on spectral processing. Using a complex low-level auditory task, Alcantara also found diminished temporal but intact spectral processing in children with autism (Alcantara et al 2004).…”

“…The EPF model predicts that A1-mediated perceptual processing will be superior in autism. Indeed, superior low-order auditory perception has been reported in experimental paradigms involving pitch perception (Bonnel et al 2003) and chord segmentation (Heaton 2003). However, few studies assessing complex low-level perceptual tasks in the auditory domain that require extensive neural integration have yet been conducted (Teder-Salejarvi et al 2005;Alcantara et al 2004).…”

The Effect of Movement Activities in Synchronization With Music on Motor Proficiency of Children With Autism

“…Music therapy as an alternative medicine in conjunction with the effect of joint attention, social interaction and verbal/nonverbal communication, can address motor dysfunction, sensory deficits and behavioral problems in children with autism [15]. The rhythm of music, which is the most structural part of it, can influence some different areas of the brain such as the motor area by making auditory motor integration and coordination [16][17][18].…”