Pitch memory, labelling and disembedding in autism.

Return to Vaccination News Home Page

Subscribe to the Vaccination NewsLetter

View past & current Scandals (columns by Sandy Mintz)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12751846&dopt=Abstract

J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2003 May;44(4):543-51.

Pitch memory, labelling and disembedding in autism.

Heaton P.

Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, New Cross, London, UK. P.Heaton@gold.ac.uk

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.

PMID: 12751846 [PubMed - in process]

Return to Vaccination News Home Page

DISCLAIMER: All information, data, and material contained, presented, or provided here is for general information purposes only and is not to be construed as reflecting the knowledge or opinions of the publisher, and is not to be construed or intended as providing medical or legal advice. The decision whether or not to vaccinate is an important and complex issue and should be made by you, and you alone, in consultation with your health care provider.