Auditory and frontal anatomic correlates of pitch discrimination in musicians, non-musicians, and children without music
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Auditory and frontal anatomic correlates of pitch discrimination in musicians, non‑musicians, and children without musical training María‑Ángeles Palomar‑García1 · Mireia Hernández2 · Gustau Olcina3 · Jesús Adrián‑Ventura1 · Víctor Costumero4 · Anna Miró‑Padilla1 · Esteban Villar‑Rodríguez1 · César Ávila1 Received: 3 February 2020 / Accepted: 23 September 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Keywords Gray matter · Heschl’s gyrus · Inferior frontal gyrus · Pitch discrimination · Voxel-based morphometry
Introduction Pitch is a primary perceptual dimension of sounds, and it plays an important role in music and speech perception (Oxenham 2012). Pitch discrimination reflects the ability to encode regularities in music and detect tonal mismatching information. This capacity is developed at a very early age, as revealed by a processing bias toward unequal-step scales found in 9-month-old infants (Trehub et al. 1999; Benasich and Tallal 2002) and by studies showing that musical training at 9 months of age may improve the ability to detect tonal mismatching information (Zhao and Kuhl 2016). The fact that this precocious ability arises long before the individual engages in any musical training suggests that different cognitive processes (e.g., speech processing or working memory) exert an influence on its development. In fact, Benasich and Tallal (2002) found that auditory processing abilities at the age of 9 months were the best predictor of language outcomes at 2 years of age. The development of pitch discrimination continues until approximately the age of seven years, * María‑Ángeles Palomar‑García [email protected] 1
Neuropsychology and Functional Neuroimaging Group, Department of Basic Psychology, Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology, Universitat Jaume I, Avda. Sos Baynat, s/n., 12071 Castellón de la Plana, Spain
2
Cognition and Brain Plasticity Group, Department of Cognition, Development and Educational Psychology, Institut de Neurociències, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
3
Neuropsychology and Functional Neuroimaging Group, Department of Education, University Jaume I, 12071 Castellón, Spain
4
Center for Brain and Cognition, University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
which is when children are able to discriminate complex, brief tones—a capacity that is still lacking in 4–5 year-old children (Thompson et al. 1999). Furthermore, Schneider et al. (2005) emphasize that relative pitch of harmonic complex sounds, such as instrumental sounds, depends on spectral envelope and fundamental frequency information with different weighting, and it cannot be explained by a simple one-to-one relationship between perceived pitch and fundamental frequency. Specifically, they propose that greater GM volume and enhanced functional MEG activity in the left lateral Heschl’s gyrus may predispose one to hear the fundamental frequency in an ambiguous tone, whereas in the right lateral Heschl’s gyrus may lead to a dominant perception of spectral pitch or single har
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