Lecture given in York in February 2012 which features many of the studies from the Music, Mind and Brain group based at Goldsmiths University of London.
Boost PC performance: How more available memory can improve productivity
Congenital amusia york 2012
1. The Musical Mind: Insights from Congenital Amusia Dr. Vicky Williamson http://www.gold.ac.uk/music-mind-brain/ http://www.gold.ac.uk/psychology/staff/victoria-williamson/
10. Diagnosis - MBEA The Montreal Battery for the Evaluation of Amusia Hear 2 melodies and say same or different Subtests: Scale, Contour, Interval, Rhythm, Meter (Memory)
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12. Based on Loui et al. (2008) Testing pitch direction 0
14. An alternative – AXB tasks Pitch Detection Pitch Direction The advantage of this task is that it is ''criterion free'' (Macmillan & Creelman, 2005)
Triangles represent individuals with lower (better) perception thresholds compared to production thresholds, while circles represent individuals with lower production thresholds compared to perception thresholds.
Reduces the involvement of decision criteria: w hich eliminates the effect of any bias amusic individuals may have toward favoring a more conservative “no change” response.
The finding that amusics‟ pitch direction perception thresholds are sensitive to task demands suggests that the extent to which individual amusic participants show relatively preserved perception thresholds depends on the extent to which internal representations of pitch direction are associated with a) conventional labels (“up; down”) and b) the mapping of these representations onto the vocal apparatus; both abilities are likely to vary across amusic individuals.
Not all amusics have pitch perception difficulties The stimuli used in the tone span task were 10 triangle-waveform tones, with fundamental frequencies drawn from between 262 and 741 Hz in equally tempered, whole tone steps (from C4 to F#5). Rise and fall times were linear over 20 ms and tone durations were 500 ms. A trial began when the experimenter pressed the spacebar. A 500-ms pause was followed by two successive sequences. There was an inter-stimulus interval of 383 ms and an intersequence interval of 2 s, based on the timings of the original paradigm. The two sequences contained the same number of items, selected from the pool of 10 items by constrained random sampling without replacement. Temporally adjacent digits differed by at least two in absolute value while adjacent tones differed by at least two whole tones. Digit sequence presentation started off at four items while tone sequences began at two items. Tones were selected from the pool of 10 tones ranging from C4 to F#5 in equally tempered,
Connects receptive areas of temporal lobe with pre-motor areas in frontal cortex Previously associated with conduction aphasia
But structural imaging studies fail to shed any light on the functional aspects of the disorder. ERPs hold special promise is this regard since the high temporal resolution of this approach is highly suited to measuring neural processing of dynamically evolving stimuli such as music.
Also a P2 latency effect – task difficulty and speed of processing?