Abstract
Amusia (commonly referred to as tone-deafness) is a difficulty in discriminating pitch changes in melodies that affects around 4% of the human population. Amusia cannot be explained as a simple sensory impairment. Here we show that amusia is strongly related to a deficit in spatial processing in adults. Compared to two matched control groups (musicians and non-musicians), participants in the amusic group were significantly impaired on a visually presented mental rotation task. Amusic subjects were also less prone to interference in a spatial stimulus-response incompatibility task and performed significantly faster than controls in an interference task in which they were required to make simple pitch discriminations while concurrently performing a mental rotation task. This indicates that the processing of pitch in music normally depends on the cognitive mechanisms that are used to process spatial representations in other modalities.
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Thanks to L. Franz and R. O'Shea for useful comments on the manuscript and the procedure.
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Supplementary Fig. 1
The relationship between scores on the MBEA subtest and errors on the mental rotation task, with the data from two left-handed amusic subjects marked with asterisks. (PDF 78 kb)
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Douglas, K., Bilkey, D. Amusia is associated with deficits in spatial processing. Nat Neurosci 10, 915–921 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1925
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1925
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