Short- and long-term memory for pitch and non-pitch contours: Insights from congenital amusia.

ABSTRACT: Congenital amusia is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in music perception, including discriminating and remembering melodies and melodic contours. As non-amusic listeners can perceive contours in dimensions other than pitch, such as loudness and brightness, our present study investigated whether amusics' pitch contour deficits also extend to these other auditory dimensions. Amusic and control participants performed an identification task for ten familiar melodies and a short-term memory task requiring the discrimination of changes in the contour of novel four-tone melodies. For both tasks, melodic contour was defined by pitch, brightness, or loudness. Amusic participants showed some ability to extract contours in all three dimensions. For familiar melodies, amusic pa

SUBMITTER: Graves JE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6953621 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature